Trying to book meetings outside my own organization is very frustrating. The workload increases by the increments of the number of people you try to invite! Once you have found a common meeting time (after numerous emails or phone calls) you can be sure someone needs to cancel the meeting and you have to start all over again.
The solution to this problem actually begun with ourselves having to few conference rooms and the usual "I-was-here-first" approach. Before we tore our throats out, I started to wonder how to make this better. The idea of using the features for resource scheduling in Microsoft Exchange/Outlook was not new, but previous versions of Exchange had a very poor API...
Being someone with lots of ideas, I have during the years learned that you need to be patient and monitor technology changes over the years in order to find a solution:-) Therefore my faithful programmer Ruwen Jin was given a couple of days to see how we now could make a web page that exposes Exchange resources. Using something called Webdav Ruwen managed to do a new EPiServer page type (what else? :-) together with some background code that actually works!
We then took one of our old (small) PCs and mounted a TFT screen outside the conference rooms.
The screen outside the conference rooms.
Detail view of the web page, displaying both conference rooms since we needed to save hardware...
To schedule a meeting involving a conference room is now very easy: just invite the conference room- the free/busy time is displayed as any regular user!
Since this ended "The Battle of the Conference Rooms" I started to think about other possibilities for this technology. According to Ruwen, we could expose anything in Exchange, not just calendars! Also, our technology only relies on that the Outlook Web Access is enabled in Exchange. The beauty of this is that we did not have to touch any firewall setting or hassle with our internal IT about security, we could have our web server exposing calendars on any Exchange server on the Internet (as long as the right user credentials and password was used).
Ruwen tweaked the conference room web page (called EPiWebDavCalendar in EPiServer, we just love these user friendly names :-) into my personal calendar page. (You can check it out at http://r.ep.se/MySite/Mikael_Runhem/calendar/ .) This way, people that like to have a meeting with me can see my free/busy time (without any details), mark the time and send a meeting invitation. The meeting invitation is sent to me as a regular Outlook invitation that I can accept or deny! The inviting part also gets an email with an Outlook invitation. That way we can reschedule the meeting or update the meeting information if needed.
My calendar, showing my Outlook meetings.
On the wish list for the future are:
- Selecting more than just one meeting attendee, with all calendars placed on top.
- adding the inviting parts calendar (by having him/her entering the URL to the Exchange web access, username and password. Yes, there are security issues here, we know..)
- Webex integration.
Since we at the EPiServer Research team are working for the good of the EPiServer community, we decided to make this code available to all EPiServer partners and customers without cost. We hope that other developers takes this technology further and develops cool EPiServer based stuff.
The code can be downloaded for free at the project page: http://r.ep.se/projects/OutlookExchange_integration/
Have fun!
/Mikael Runhem, Team Leader, EPiServer Research