Use color categories for quick identification. Outlook 2007 has combined color and category labeling of appointments and events and allows you to define the name of each category and the color associated with it. By defining a set of categories that fits the categories of events, appointments, and information you will be storing in your calendar, you can make it easy to mark (and later identify) the nature and significance of items in your calendar at a glance. These user-defined color categories can provide you with visual cues that help you identify calendar items, tasks, and e-mail that are related—such as a departmental project or role-based recurring activities. The color categories in Outlook 2007 are contained in your default data file; thus for users of Microsoft Exchange Server, your color categories are available regardless of which computer you log on from.

Use automatic formatting to format items based on user-selectable criteria. In addition to color categories, you can use automatic formatting to assign a color to appointments, events, and so on in your calendar based on criteria that you define. This can be particularly useful in that you can provide specific words, phrases, or other criteria that Outlook 2007 will use to automatically tag the appointment or event with a specific color. You can use automatic formatting, for example, to find the phrase Phone Conference in the Subject or Notes field of appointments and automatically color all those items in your calendar (with a color you select) to provide you with visual cues that the item involves a phone conference.

Delegate calendar update responsibilities. In managing your calendar, scheduling appointments and events, and communicating your schedule information effectively, you can make use of the abilities to delegate access and degrees of editing and authoring control to team members, assistants, and key people involved in ongoing projects.

For network environments using Microsoft Exchange, however, the ability to delegate differential levels of control can be a useful way to turn schedule management into a cooperative effort. Even without providing other users with the ability to send e-mail messages as you, you can nevertheless enable them to read your schedule, create new items or subfolders, edit and delete their own additions to your schedule, and even edit all calendar content. When you are working closely with an associate or a team member on a mutual project, that person could add schedule items on your behalf that address his or her area (documentation, code development, marketing) of responsibility.

Share your calendar information. In addition to those environments where you can directly delegate access to read information from and write information to your calendar, in all cases you can post your calendar information to the external or internal Web servers so that management, team, and project members can view your schedule information. In some cases, you might want to publish only the free/busy portion of your schedule information—for example, when publishing your schedule on the Internet. But when publishing your schedule to internal corporate Web servers, you will want to provide access to more detail so that coworkers and managers stay up to date. The Outlook 2007 Publish To Internet options let you specify the date range and level of detail published, determine access (everyone or just those you invite), and select calendar update frequency. You can also share your calendar via e-mail with the selected group of e-mail recipients for whom your calendar is relevant by using the Send Via E-Mail option. This option also lets you choose the date range and level of detail sent so that you can control how much of your calendar information you are providing.

Use views to manage your calendar. The various views of your calendar provide a built-in way for you to quickly assess your schedule—simply switching between the Day, Week, and Month tabs reminds you of your scheduled activities. Using the built-in views enables you to see your schedule laid out as a timeline (which you can view on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis). Other default views enable you to see all of your scheduled items as a list that you can sort by date, type of appointment or event, subject, category, and a range of other criteria. Using these views can help you quickly find events and appointments of current topical interest and provide reminders of upcoming scheduled obligations. When specific view and filter criteria are particularly useful for you, creating a custom view using these criteria will provide you with an instant ability to see your schedule information in that format.

Use Overlays to Compare Calendars. For everyone in a work environment, the scheduling of appointments and events has interdependencies with coworkers, teams, project groups, and departments. To avoid scheduling conflicts, it can be very helpful to align your schedule with schedules from other people or groups you are working with. Using Outlook 2007 to bring in additional calendars (from coworkers or groups) and review them in overlay mode greatly facilitates the comparing of schedules.