MS Outlook Questions

[LarryG]

I know there are a lot of IT types here, some of whom may be able to help with this.

The backstory, briefly:

We run a small, peer-to-peer network of Win2000 and XP machines.

We currently have one iPhone user, two Palm Treo/Centro smartphone users, one Palm PDA user, and will likely soon have at least one more iPhone user. All these devices are capable of synching with MS Outlook. The Palm users (of which I am one) are all currently using Palm Desktop for contacts, calendar, and to-do lists; it looks to me like Outlook can handle these things equally well.

The one iPhone user is already using Outlook for e-mail. Everyone else is using an e-mail client that's getting rather long in the tooth (The Bat! v1.62) which we have been considering replacing with something more modern.

Lastly, we have one other person who used Outlook in the past and liked it.

Sum total of all this is that we're considering switching everyone to Outlook.

My questions are:

1. Is it possible with Outlook to have a common Contacts list that can be shared with everyone in the office?

2. Is it possible with Outlook to have a common calendar that everyone can see, so we'll all know each others' schedules? Ideally we'd like this to be editable by everyone in the office.

3. If Outlook alone cannot do these things, what else would we need? (Note that because of the iPhone synching requirement, Outlook itself is the mandatory starting point.)

I will likely have follow-up questions, and can of course supply whatever additional info may be needed. Thanks much!

[poolhound]

The answers to#1 and #2 is definatley yes these are some of the advantages of outlook.

Global addressbooks can be setup that everybody sees and they can aslo have the option of creating their own private ones e.g. for personal contacts

You can setup calendars for static items as well as people e.g. conference rooms and pieces of equipment so people can book them and others can see if they are available or not.

[poolhound]

to setup outlook like this you really need an exchange server. if you dont have that many people you can do this through an external hosted service rather than invest in new HW and software. This is what I do now.

[pelligrini]

I'm not sure if you can get outlook to work that way in a peer to peer network. I know we couldn't do it several years ago at our office. We ended up going with Small Business Server. It has been fairly easy to maintain and setup wasn't bad at all.

[cgallery]

My questions are:

1. Is it possible with Outlook to have a common Contacts list that can be shared with everyone in the office?

Not w/o either: (1) An in-house Exchange server. (2) A hosted Exchange solution from someone like Intermedia or RackSpace. (3) A third-party sharing package like Public Sharefolders.

For offices fewer than 30-users, a hosted Exchange solution is about your best bet. Accounts run about $12/month per user.

2. Is it possible with Outlook to have a common calendar that everyone can see, so we'll all know each others' schedules? Ideally we'd like this to be editable by everyone in the office.

See my answer to #1 above.

3. If Outlook alone cannot do these things, what else would we need? (Note that because of the iPhone synching requirement, Outlook itself is the mandatory starting point.)

I will likely have follow-up questions, and can of course supply whatever additional info may be needed. Thanks much!

Again, answered in #1.