DeskNow can publish your freebusy (availability) information on the internet. This lets people using external calendaring applications like Outlook to view your availability for meetings.
Note that your freebusy information is always accessible by DeskNow users via the web interface.
By publishing your freebusy information, however, you can make it available to people that are not using the web interface, and/or that are not in your company.
To publish your freebusy information, simply go to Preferences/Calendar and enable the relative option. You can also decide how much information in the future you want to publish (for instance, only publishing information for the next 60 days).
To access published freebusy information, external calendaring applications must use the following URL:
http://www.mydomain.com/desknow/freebusy/user@mydomain.com/freebusy.vfb
Where www.mydomain.com is the address of your DeskNow server, user is your username, and mydomain.com your domain name (this can be omitted if it is the default domain).
In Outlook 2003 it is possible to define a single way to lookup all the freebusy information (at least what is published) for all the users of the system. To do this, simply go to Tools/Options/Calendar/FreeBusy Options and in 'Search location' enter the following URL:
http://www.mydomain.com/desknow/freebusy/%NAME%@%SERVER%/user.vfb
(leave %NAME% and %SERVER% exactly as is, and replace www.mydomain.com with your server address).
Every time you will add a meeting participant by its email address, Outlook will look up his availability on the DeskNow server, replacing %NAME% and %SERVER% with the appropriate values taken from the email address (considering the email address %NAME%@%SERVER%).
Please note: it is not possible for Outlook to publish its freebusy information on DeskNow. If you use the Outlook Connector, anyway, this is not necessary as DeskNow automatically mantains your freebusy information.