Share Corporate Calendar-Contacts-Email or Whatever With External People Using Outlook and Publish to Office.com Cloud Services

Have you ever wanted to share your corporate calendar or email with someone outside your organization and found it is not so easy to do. Well, you can do some really cool things by synchronizing your calendar or other parts of outlook with Office.com.  Office 2010 ROCKS!!!!

The Microsoft Outlook Calendar Sharing Service enables you to publish and share calendars on Office.com. You control who can view or subscribe to calendars that you publish.

Your friends and colleagues can subscribe to your published calendar and receive updates in programs such as Outlook, Windows Live Calendar, Google Calendar, or Apple iCal.

Publish a calendar to Office.com

1. In Calendar, in the Navigation Pane (navigation pane: The area in the Help window that contains the Table of Contents, the Answer Wizard, and the Index.), under My Calendars, select the check box for the calendar that you want to publish.

Note Make sure that only one calendar check box is selected.

1. On the Home tab, in the Share group, click Publish Online, and then click Publish to Office.com.

Note If you are using a Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 account, your Exchange administrator can block access to this feature. An alternate method for publishing calendars to the Internet might be available. On the Home tab, in the Share group, click Publish Online, and then click Publish this Calendar. You are prompted to sign in to Outlook Web Access to complete the steps. Follow the instructions that appear.

1. If this is the first time that you have used the Outlook Calendar Publishing Service, a dialog box appears so that you can register for Office.com using a Windows Live ID. If you do not have a free Windows Live ID, you can create one during the registration process. Click Sign in, and then follow the instructions that appear.

When the initial registration process is complete, the Publish Calendar to Office.com dialog box appears.

1. For Time Span, select how many days of calendar information to share.
2. For Detail, click the down arrow, and then choose the amount of detail to share.
3. If you are publishing your main default Outlook calendar, the Show time within my working hours only check box appears. If you have set workday hours in Outlook and want to restrict shared details to those hours, select the check box.
4. For Permissions, choose whether you want to restrict access to invited subscribers or allow access to anyone who knows the Web address for the calendar. Restricting access requires each subscriber to use a Windows Live ID.
   • Only invited users can subscribe to this calendar An Outlook sharing e-mail message opens after the calendar is published to Office.com. Send the sharing e-mail message to each person to whom you want to grant access to your calendar. The sharing message includes a link to the calendar. You can also include additional information in the message, just as you would with a regular message.
   • Anyone can subscribe to this calendar Anyone who knows the link to your calendar can view it. A Windows Live ID is not required to access your calendar.

Changes that you make to the calendar are published to Office.com during the next manual or automatic Outlook send/receive process. By default, there is a 30-minute interval between each automatic send/receive for each Send/Receive group. The minimum interval for automatic send/receive is 20 minutes.

1. If you do not plan to publish updates for this calendar, click Advanced, and then click Single Upload: Updates will not be uploaded.
2. Click OK.

After your calendar is successfully published on Office.com, you can invite people to subscribe to the calendar. To let others know about your published calendar, when prompted to send a sharing invitation, click Yes.

Grant access to a published calendar

Note If you have restricted who can view and subscribe to the calendar, subscribers must have a Windows Live ID to access the published calendar. There is no cost to sign up for a Windows Live ID.

1. In Calendar, in the Navigation Pane (navigation pane: The area in the Help window that contains the Table of Contents, the Answer Wizard, and the Index.), click the calendar that you have published to Office.com and want to invite others to see.
2. On the Home tab, in the Share group, click Publish Online, and then click Share Published Calendar.

1. In the sharing invitation message, enter the names of the people to whom you want to grant permissions.

The sharing message includes a link to the calendar. You can also include additional information in the message, just as you would with a regular message.

1. When you are ready to send the sharing message, click Send.

Remove access to a private published calendar

When you initially publish a calendar to Office.com you chose whether the calendar is accessible to anyone or only to people you invite. If you decide to revoke access to someone that you had initially invited, do the following:

1. In Calendar, in the Navigation Pane (navigation pane: The area in the Help window that contains the Table of Contents, the Answer Wizard, and the Index.), click the shared calendar that you want to change.

Note Make sure that only one calendar check box is selected.

1. On the Home tab, in the Share group, click Publish Online, and then click Change Sharing Permissions.

1. Click the person that you no longer want to grant access to the calendar, and then click Remove.

Change whether a published calendar is private or public

When you initially publish a calendar to Office.com you chose whether the calendar is accessible to anyone or to only people that you invite. To change whether the published calendar is private or public, do the following:

1. In Calendar, in the Navigation Pane (navigation pane: The area in the Help window that contains the Table of Contents, the Answer Wizard, and the Index.), click the shared calendar that you want to change.

Note Make sure that only one calendar check box is selected.

1. On the Home tab, in the Share group, click Publish Online, and then click Change Publishing Options.

1. For Permissions, click Only invited users can subscribe to this calendar or Anyone can subscribe to this calendar.

Change the time span or detail level of a published calendar

After you have published a calendar to Office.com you can revise the publishing options, such as the dates that are shared or amount of detail included. Changes made in Outlook to a shared calendar are published to Office.com during the next manual or automatic Outlook send/receive process.

1. In Calendar, in the Navigation Pane (navigation pane: The area in the Help window that contains the Table of Contents, the Answer Wizard, and the Index.), click the shared calendar that you want to change.
2. On the Home tab, in the Share group, click Publish Online, and then click Change Publishing Options.

1. Change the options that you want, and then click OK.

Preview your published calendar

To preview what information is published to your Office.com calendar with the Outlook Calendar Service, you can subscribe to your own calendar in Outlook or, in some cases, use Windows Live Calendar.

Note If the calendar was published with the Only invited users can subscribe to this calendar permission setting, then you must preview the calendar within Outlook. Windows Live Calendar cannot access private calendars.

Outlook 2010

1. In Calendar, in the Navigation Pane, under My Calendars, select the check box for the calendar.

Note Make sure that only one calendar check box is selected.

1. On the Home tab, in the Share group, click Publish Online, and then click Share Published Calendar.

1. In the sharing invitation message, select the URL, and then press CTRL+C to copy to the Windows clipboard.
2. Close the sharing invitation message.
3. In Calendar, on the Home tab, in the Manage Calendars group, click Open Calendar, and then click From Internet.

1. In the New Internet Calendar Subscription dialog box, click the URL address box, and then press CTRL+V to paste the URL that you copied in step 3.
2. Click OK.

The calendar opens in Outlook and a new calendar entry appears in the Navigation Pane under Other Calendars.

Note If the calendar does not appear, make sure that you changed the URL prefix from webcals:// to webcal:// in step 6.

Windows Live Calendar

Note You cannot subscribe to private calendars — a calendar you published with the Only invited users can subscribe to this calendar permission setting — in Windows Live Calendar. Use the steps in the previous section for viewing the calendar in Outlook.

1. In Calendar, in the Navigation Pane, under My Calendars, select the check box for the calendar.

Note Make sure that only one calendar check box is selected.

1. On the Home tab, in the Share group, click Share Calendar.

1. In the sharing invitation message, select the URL, and then press CTRL+C to copy to the Windows clipboard.
2. Close the sharing invitation message.
3. Sign in to Windows Live Calendar using your Windows Live ID.
4. On your Windows Live Calendar page, click Subscribe, and then click Subscribe to a public calendar.

1. In the Calendar URL box, press CTRL+V to paste the URL that you copied in step 3.

Important You must change the beginning of the URL from webcals:// to webcal:// removing the letter s.

1. In the Calendar name box, enter a descriptive name for the calendar, such as Soccer practice.
2. Click Subscribe to calendar.

The calendar appears on your Windows Live Calendar page.

Delete a published calendar

To delete a calendar published to Office.com with the Outlook Calendar Publishing Service, do the following:

1. In Calendar, select the check box for the calendar that you want to remove from Office.com.
2. On the Home tab, in the Share group, click Publish Online, and then click Remove from Server.