Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why can’t I see the free/busy data for one of my contacts?

Ans: Outlook will only grab free/busy information for a contact if the contact card for that person is located in the contacts folder in the email folder set where you receive your incoming messages.

Ans: You must be sure you have the string correctly entered per the instructions in the email you received from that user and you must enter an email address for that person in his/her contact form.

Ans: Each address card used in a meeting request must have a unique email address. The same email address cannot be assigned to any other address cards anywhere in Outlook.

Q: Can I publish more then two months of free/busy data from Outlook?

Ans: Yes, you can. Outlook will publish several years of data, for those who like to plan far in advance. You can change the setting from the default of two months as follows: 1) On the Tools menu, click Options; 2) On the Preferences tab, click Calendar Options; 3) Click Free/Busy Options. Change the value stored in the publish quantity box; 4) Click Okay to close all dialogs.

Q: I updated my online key to use a different calendar link, but the person to whom I'm sharing it does not see the changes in their Outlook scheduling window.

Ans: Outlook is caching the free/busy data from the last time your colleague loaded your info from our servers. They only have to shutdown and restart their Outlook client to have it retrieve the latest data.

Q: Some of my personal calendar events don’t show up.

Ans: Some calendar software marks events as 'Free' or 'Available' rather than 'Busy' when you create them. You must either change that setting for all events where you are actually busy, or change the switch setting for that source. Be sure to republish the calendar source to our server after changing this switch setting.

If you have questions that are not covered here, please contact us.