Free/busy information for Group Schedule members not up to date in Outlook

When you use the Group Schedule feature in Microsoft Outlook, appointments may not be displayed when you view free/busy data.

This issue can occur when attendees are not running Outlook consistently and only check e-mail occasionally.

Set up attendees as a resource account. To do this, follow these steps:

1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
2. On the Preferences tab, click Calendar Options, and then click Resource Scheduling.
3. Click to select the Automatically accept meeting requests and process cancellations. Click OK twice.
4. On the Preferences tab, click E-mail Options.
5. Click Tracking Options, and then click Process requests and responses on arrival. This enables direct booking and the free/busy data is immediately published upon acceptance.

If immediate free/busy data is necessary when a user is not delivering messages to his or her Microsoft Exchange Server mailbox (and messages are delivered to a personal folder file instead), use the Invite Others button when you plan meetings. Include those recipients in the Resource field instead of the Required field or the Optional field.

When Appointments are being created with several attendees, Autoprocessing must be enabled by all the people who are using the group schedule in the Outlook 2002. For more information about Direct Booking, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: NOTE: Direct booking is not available in Microsoft Outlook for the Macintosh.