How can I coordinate with my wife in the same way I coordinate with my
officemates using Outlook
My exchange 2003 server and outlook 2003 client makes it super easy to
coordinate and collaborate with my office team and my admin.
I can see when people are free/busy and propose meeting times. they
can see when I am free and what meeting I am in, in case they want to
join the meeting or have some info that might be helpful for me to
have at that meeting.
The task delegation is also wonderful. I can send a task request to
my admin asking her to write a thank you letter to a new customer. I
know if she accepts it and even better, I know when it is done because
when she marks it complete on her task list, I get a notice in my
inbox. I know it is done w/o even having to call and ask her.
How can I have the same features when coordinating with my wife?
How can I see what she (or the kids) are doing on Friday night so I
know if to accept a invite to a one-on-one basketball game with my
friend? if I could see her calendar, how and see she is open on tues
night, how could I send her a meeting request for a dinner date at our
favorite Italian restaurant and know within hours if she said yes, and
have it automatically added to my calendar.
how could she send me a Outlook Task Request to pickup dog food on the
way home, and If I hit the Decline button, know that I can?t do it,
and find someone else to go it so our pooch won?t go hungry tonight.
I want to be able to do these kind of things w/o have to try to catch
me via email or voice mail tag. I want to be able to bring up her
calendar (and maybe each of our kids calendars and have then side by
side in my outlook, next to my Outlook calendar, just like I can do
with my officemates. Coordinating the family calendar right now is
hellish.
These things are so easy to do at work, I want them also to be easy to
do on the home front.
My employer will not give my wide (much less my kids) accts on our
company exchange server.
I already have everything in my outlook, and don?t want to get an acct
on something like hotmail calendar or yahoo calendar and then have to
manage 2 calendars, and 2 task lists.
I looked into getting her and each kid an acct on a 3rd party exchange
ASP hosting company (like lanlogic.com or asp-one.com or
Intermedia.net), but this solution fails in 2 respects.
1 ? while I can send an Outlook meeting invite to external exchange
server (I do it with our printing vendor) my exchange server and the
their exchange server can?t share free/bust times, so I don?t know
when he is free and it is hard to know when to propose a time for a
conf call.
2 ? Tasks requests don?t work across exchange server (I tried with my
printing vendor) and it came to him and an email with another email
attached and the text of the task request instead of that. what a
mess. No accept or Decline buttons.
3 ? In Outlook 2003, I can show my calendar side by side with my
adman?s calendar (or a officemates calendar), but I can?t show my
printing vendors calendar side by side with mine.
I have 3 questions:
#1
Is there any product or service that will address one of all of these
needs? or maybe some workaround?
#2 Does Microsoft?s free/busy service for consumers offer a solution
(http://freebusy.office.microsoft.com/freebusy/freebusy.dll) (does it
somehow integrate into a company?s free/busy database on the company
exchange server?). opps,I just did a search in google and found it is
being discontinued (http://microsoft.weblogsinc.com/entry/5068642541918497/)
.
#3 How about if I buy my wife a blackberry, will that help somehow?
thanx in advnce, |
