There is no vacation from holidays in Outlook / Exchange

 

Add holidays into Outlook.  What’s the big deal?  Have the users enter the list of holidays.  Next issue. Why should an Exchange administrator bother about holidays?  If your company has only 50 users, and hires three people each year, you might want to skip to the next article. The Exchange Admins we’ve spoken with - from medical schools to 1,000+ user high tech corporations - say this is one of life’s major annoyances for them and for their end users.   In the course of a month we’ve heard the following problems among our clients:

 

·         How can I get everybody up on the academic holidays for 2004-2005 in an easy, automated way?

·         How can I get my field sales organization to not schedule big seminars on Rosh Hashanah?

·         How do I keep my international sites in the loop on US holidays?

 

It’s tedious, inconsistent, and a help-desk headache when end users add holidays to their Outlook calendars.  It’s bothersome to other users when it’s not done consistently.  It’s a potential a source of broken links in Exchange as meetings need to be re-proposed.  And, it’s a pain for Exchange administrators who are expected to keep problems like this from happening at all.

  

How the problems manifest themselves

 

It’s year end and time to update 1,200 end user’s calendars with the 2005 holiday schedule. You send out a shotgun email to the user community with the schedule and the steps to add the holidays to Outlook, and pray it doesn’t causes the help desk phones to light up.  Ok, it’s only once a year -- except when you have to repeat this process every time you add a new user to your Active Directory.

 

If a set of users do not use a holiday list, they can start proposing and accepting meetings on holidays.  These meetings then need to be moved or deleted and re-proposed and this starts to introduce data integrity problems into the Exchange store (KB Articles: 824212, 323222 et al), to say nothing of those whining calls about how users were allowed to do this in the first place.  Of course, the problem becomes even more acute when using Exchange to schedule meetings that cross national boundaries (and therefore national holidays). (Did you remember not to schedule a meeting on August 2^nd with your Canadian counterparts because it’s “Civic Day” holiday?)

 

Plus, from your end user’s perspective, having an “official”, accurate holiday list distributed and enforced across all users in an organization is not a convenience but a crucial aspect of effectively using Exchange to manage time in your organization.

 

Maintaining the completeness of its implementation across users is therefore an ongoing responsibility for Exchange admins. 

 

Having dealt with this issue for several clients after their migration to Exchange from other calendaring systems, we’ve seen all of these issues assume greater importance.

 

The existing choices

 

There are three existing choices for holiday insertion:  You can

·         Do nothing (not a desirable thing but you always have this choice)

·         Make the users deal with it:

·         Hand the user instructions for inserting their own holidays,

·         Create a public holiday calendar

·         Publish a file with a list of holidays in outlook that the user can add at their own discretion  (with 50% compliance it’s not THAT much additional help desk activity)

·         Push holidays to the user in an email (and let the user accept the holidays)

 

Assuming you’re not the type to do nothing, let’s discuss the last two choices.

 

Leave it in the hands of the user community

 

Here’s how to tell your users how to add a holidays list in Outlook at user-discretion (Tools – Options- Calendar Options- Add Holidays).  But this list has acknowledged inaccuracies[1] and every user (or your team) must do it. Then all you have to deal with are site-specific holidays[2], such as Patriot’s Day (Massachusetts), Texas Independence Day, Admission Day (California, Washington), and Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole Day (Hawaii) (see a partial list of state holidays at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0002069.html). 

 

You can use the same method to meet the specific demands of an academic calendar (which becomes increasingly important now that Exchange is gaining ground in university settings), liturgical calendars, or even corporate-specific calendars (everybody should know when the stockholders meeting is).

 

With luck all of your users follow instructions and never call support. 

 

 

Use a Public Calendar

 

You can post holidays in a public calendar.  Public calendars will communicate the information, but they do not give the user community the added value of checking free/busy time, or of providing the “one-stop” value of the user’s own Outlook calendar.

 

Push holidays to users via email

  

Some companies mail a set of holidays to new hires as “meeting invitations”.  The new hires have to accept the messages and the holidays are inserted into their calendars.  This is not perfect, but it is automatable and simplifies the end user experience. Although this works, it requires you and your end user do some work.  Plus, it does not provide you with feedback that indicates the user inserted the holidays. 

 

How is this done?

1.      Create the days you want as holidays in an administrator’s Outlook calendar.  (We’ll use Bastille Day (July 14) and Guy Fawkes’ Day (November 5).)

2.      Select them as “Busy” if you don’t expect users to be doing any meetings and want to avoid possible schedule conflicts.

3.      After you’ve added all the holidays, select them all (holding down the ALT key) in Outlook and send them to a recipient or save them in the DRAFT folder).  From here you can send them to all new hires (or the entire organization).

 

While this is more automated, it’s clearly not an optimal, one-stop solution. 

 

A solution requiring no end user intervention.

 

We, like our clients, hate the alternatives because they add more adminis-trivia to our lives, and force end users to think.  Sumatra’s core business is to insert hundred thousands of entries into Outlook calendars without any Exchange Admin intervention. Our customers asked us to help them make this problem go away.  So we built a tool to help us insert holidays, and linked this tool into the process by which we manage Exchange accounts, calendars, and mailboxes.  What was our approach?

 

Using the CDO interface provided in Exchange 2000/2003, Sumatra Development has written a utility which inserts a list of holidays directly into the calendars of Exchange users without requiring user intervention.

 

Further, as a small-footprint DOS application the utility is scriptable and can be readily integrated into the user account creation process.

 

We’ve made a version of the holiday insertion code available off our web site at http://www.sumatra.com/su.htm.  It requires that the user provide a name and email, but nothing else (and we do not sell contact information).

 

The utility can be run on the command line for a single user:

su.exe /u:user /h:holidaydata.txt /v

 

 

 

Note:  The holiday insertion code is part of a larger set of utilities. A fuller utility which will take a list of users and insert holidays (convenient for turn of calendar occasions), check integrity of Exchange calendars, look for duplicate meetings in resources, as well provide as several other functions is available for a charge.  The utility’s use and syntax are shown below:

 

 

 

International considerations

 

For multinational corporations or government offices, you can insert Informational holidays.  For instance, there are many Europeans who wonder where everyone in the US office is the next to last Thursday in November.   Similarly, there are large numbers of Americans in corporate headquarters who wonder where all the Europeans go after Easter or all the Paris office employees on July 14.

 

For informational purposes, you might also wish to tag the Time Zone of the holiday.  For instance, Thanksgiving in the USA will span two different calendar days in Japan, on the other side of the International Date Line.  It might be important to show this to international offices or sites.