Automate Opening Multiple Calendars in Outlook - vba

I have a situation where an office just created a couple of dozen shared meeting room calendars for all of their office meeting rooms. There are about 100 or so employees. The plan right now is to send a document around to all of them explaining how to add all of these shared calendars to their outlooks. We are running a mixed environment with some outlook 2010 and some 2007 clients and the exchange server is 2010. IS there anyway to "push" all those calendars out automatically from exchange or is there a VB script that we could run on each computer to automate the process of all 100 people adding dozens of calendars?

My recommendation is don't!
When you open your copy of Outlook, there is a pause while Outlook synchronises everything. One of the things it has to synchronise is any calendars. This can be a slooooow process particularly with busy calendars which I assume your meeting room calendars will be.

I have experienced slowdowns when utilizing more than 12 calendars in shared mode if the access is higher than reviewer. However, I have created my own workaround. Don't use direct booking. Use an auto-attendant based access.
If you want many people to be able to alter the events, then you can do so by checking out the following:
Situation: When allowing multiple people to access and send the same event, you give them access to one another's account in most cases. This is unacceptable by security standards.
The fix:
Create an equipment calendar that can be used as a Department Calendar. This is essentially the Exchange version of the corkboard calendar. Everybody can add notes and send the updates through from this calendar. How? Follow this paradigm: Everybody is a part of some grouping for security. This security grouping in AD is Universal. In Exchange you tie a Distribution list to the Security Group that's in AD. Now you can email the group. The group is the department.
The calendar you create as an equipment calendar will have some extra functions built in, right out of the box. Using a shared calendar or folder in public listing, you'd have to script it all yourself. Grant the group (not a single user) full access, and send as.
For the delegate, only the managers of the group or calendar (which could be a separate group that you set up to include a receptionist and the manager for scheduling purposes). Allow the boss to auto-book, along with the receptionist. The others do not.
Set the recurring policy and other policy settings. Let nobody book out of policy. This is not a room, it is a cork board. When people don't follow the rules, they can lose access. Grant access to the Distro group to the boss and receptionist. Then, allow them to add anybody on premises that's in the department. Now you have the calendar set up.
When they need to lock an appointment for editing, they go to the receptionist and have them book it, Sending it As their own personal ID, or go to the boss and have that person do it. If it's a team shared meeting that will be noted and continually edited by all, you have anybody book it and send as the cork-board.
Since they all have full access to the cork-board, they can edit the calendar, and since they have send as, they can send the updates to everybody. Now you just add the group as a recipient and they all get an invite. Set them up with sync, and they'll always be able to respond.
Have the responses marked read then autoredirect to the receptionist who can remove those who are busy from the attendees. Now you know who's at the meeting. Anybody can add themselves by clicking Copy to My Calendar, and they'll show up as an attendee, forwarding their response to the receptionist, who can make any other arrangements necessary. And so on.
If you make sure that the Calendar attaches the name of the booking ID to those events that are booked from outside it (receptionist and boss), they'll know which events they shouldn't delete. Want to forgo that ability? Script a change in their access to the calendar, set the Calendar itself to be able to EDIT OWN, DELETE OWN. Set all but manager and reception to Edit OWN, Delete OWN. Set Manager and reception to Owner access.
Now they can all still edit and send using the calendar, but only the manager and Receptionist can actually lock events.

Related

sharepoint registration change notification

I have a class registration set up in SharePoint 2013. Users are emailed when they register for a class. I want to create email notifications when the Start Date, Start Time or Location [fields] of the Session changes. I only want to email the users that have registered for said Session (between 1 and 400 people).
I should be able to handle this with an Alert or an Event, but can't figure it out. My SharePoint team is telling me that this is too difficult because "the columns are in Sessions [list] and not in Registrations [list view].
I've found a lot of information on general SharePoint alerts, but I can't find anything on sending notifications to a select group of users, based on another field.
You could create event receiver for the list and send email by SPUtility.SendEmail with dynamic users.
You could check sample code from here.
Create event receiver in SharePoint 2013.

How to assign activities to users inside of teams?

The issue I'm having in Dynamics CRM 2013 is the ability to assign activities or appointments to a team and have those cascade downward into individual users. The end goal here would be after assigning a lead or activity to a team, the users within that team would receive notifications, emails, etc. and those records would integrate with their 'my' sections of CRM.
The issue I see with this is that only 1 'Owner' can be set for a new record in all areas of CRM, and the 'my' sections are based off of the Owner. Therefore the users within the team won't be notified.
We are currently using a service to pull from an existing database and populate CRM, assigning new leads to a Team which contains multiple users.
Does anyone have a recommended method to do this?
Thanks for your time.
Either give the users a view of "Leads owned by Teams of which I am a member" or possibly use Queues, which are pretty much designed for the scenario you describe.
New items assigned to a Team will be added to the Team's Queue. Users can see all Queue Items not yet being worked on (from all Queues they have access to, including all Teams they are members of). A user can "work on" an item to show they are dealing with it so it no longer appears in this list of items to be worked on, and instead appears in their own list of items they are working on. A user can either complete the item or 'release' it back into the queue.
Queues can contain items of different types, eg Leads, Tasks, Cases etc.

Use SharePoint 2010 workflow to add permissions to a document library

I'm trying to create a register, in a way, so that users (who initially have read permissions) on a SharePoint site, can add themselves to a group which has contribute permissions to a document library. This is something similar to what Moodle can do, where users can enrol themselves on a course.
My thinking is that I'd setup a list that allows all users to have contribute permissions. A user would then add a very basic list item which would start a workflow. The workflow would add the said user to a group that already has contribute permissions to a document library.
If it helps, here's the reason:
We have a lot of students accessing our SharePoint site (well over 2000), and all students are under a general AD group. To use the SharePoint Learning Kit (and therefore make use of SCORM content), there has to be a SharePoint group with specific rights, and that group should, ideally, contain individual users rather than AD groups (depending on the size of the AD group). Unfortunately, there isn't a way to get our learner record system to expose a field which SharePoint could 'see' which is why all students are under a general AD group. Because there are so many students (some with similar names), it would be a hard task to get lecturers to filter through each student to add them manually to the SLK group that's needed. Which is where this idea comes in. A student could enrol themselves into the SLK group and get access to the SLK material.
And breathe.
There are a lot of possible ways to do this. For example you can create custom timer job which will run every 15 minutes and synchronize sharepoint group with list you mentioned. If you want to stick to workflow way you can create custom workflow action which will add user to sharepoint group and then create workflow which uses this activity using sharepoint designer.

Share Contact List in Outlook 2010 using LDAP

Our company would like to share our contact list in Outlook 2010. However, as we do not have Exchange, we cannot use the share contact feature in Outlook 2010.
We would like to use LDAP to share our contact list as stated in this website:
https://kb.wisc.edu/wiscmail/page.php?id=13789
As far as I know, if I add a new contact in Outlook, LDAP would not sync with it and thus I need to edit it on web. But, may I know if Outlook could get the latest contact list on LDAP server after I amend the list?
Or is there any other good suggestion for share contact list in Outlook 2010?
Thanks for any advice!
To answer your question, yes, Outlook can retrieve an up-to-date user list from your Active Directory server, but it will not happen immediately after you add\delete a user, and it's only a one way sync from Active Directory -> Outlook. An update is triggered every 24 hours (by default), in which the contact list would be synced with the users existing under the Search Base you specified in Step #10 (of the link you provided).
That being said, for contacts you wish to share, you should just be adding them as users to Active Directory, instead of adding them directly to your contact list in Outlook. You'll experience the noted latency in seeing newly added users (same goes for users that you delete as well), but it's nice only having to add them in one place, and they can then be shared amongst all of your users.
You can keep your contacts in Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express with the addind, from your LDAP server with
https://github.com/fquiroz01/LDAPSyncOutlook/
Install the App in the computer with Microsoft Outlook or Windows Mail the App keep contacts sync with the LDAP server and mail client contacts.

Email Synching into Custom App

How have people intergrated custom CRM type applications with email?
I have a Access 2003 front-end application with a SQL Server 2005 backend. One CRM
part of the application tracks the activity with the customer in a traffic
log table. Sometimes the salesstaff has communication with their customer
using email instead. What do people do to synch this up with an application?
I was thinking about creating a form to enter the initial message, so I
could save it into a table and then have the system generate a email, of
course, this doesn't handle the email communication after the initial email.
Thanks
What you need to do is setup your domain name with a free google apps account. Your sales staff can still use the clients of their choice, but since they are essentially using custom gmail accounts, every single email that they send and receive will be recorded in a nice and neat transactional format in the gmail interface. Since your sales staff is always online, they will always have access to every message they ever sent. If you want to have access to the emails, you can set it up that every single message that gets sent are automatically blind forwarded to your account. Filters can be set up to automatically tag and archive them, so you will not be overwhelmed, but you will still be able to search them. Google Apps will also give you a central contact directory similar to outlook/exchange.
Here are a few options for you:
Use web forms for all communications. When a message is sent out, the only thing it includes is a link back to the site. Responses are sent the same way.
Setup an email alias that your sales staff Cc's when they want their correspondence to be tracked. Your app would periodically read a POP mailbox, and record the traffic. Customers would have to remember to Cc the same email box for the traffic to be remembered.
Establish a single common email box, such as sales#domain.com. All outgoing mail is marked as being from that account, so all replies will go through it. To send mail, sales staff uses a web form. Messages are tagged with a key that associates them with a particular customer. Putting the key in the subject header usually works OK (that's how many support ticket management systems work, for example). Replies from customers keep the tag. Your app then reads an associated POP mailbox, parses out the keys, and stores the email accordingly.