Copyright ©1996, Que Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system without prior written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Making copies of any part of this book for any purpose other than your own personal use is a violation of United States copyright laws. For information, address Que Corporation, 201 West 103rd Street, Indianapolis, IN 46290 or at support@mcp .com.

Notice: This material is excerpted from Special Edition Using Microsoft Exchange Server, ISBN: 0-7897-0687-3. The electronic version of this material has not been through the final proof reading stage that the book goes through before being published in printed form. Some errors may exist here that are corrected before the book is published. This material is provided "as is" without any warranty of any kind.

29 - Integrating Schedule+ with Exchange Server

Before you roll out Microsoft Schedule+ as part of your migration to Exchange, you need to take a few things into account. This chapter covers those issues in depth, provides some examples of real-world situations, and recommends some solutions to tough problems that you are certain to face.

This chapter covers the following topics:

Schedule+ Compatibility

Schedule+ Version 7.0 ships with the Exchange CD-ROM as well as with Microsoft Office for Windows 95. This version is incompatible with the versions that shipped with Windows NT Server, NT Workstation, and all versions of Microsoft Office before the Windows 95 version.

The product was completely revamped, its was interface changed, and more than 100 changes were made to enhance functionality and ease of use. Backward-compatibility issues arise with every software product, however, and Schedule+ is no exception. You must make sure that everyone in your organization is using the most current version.

If you used Schedule+ before Exchange, you can easily export your data to the new version so that you won't lose any data. The tool that you use is Microsoft Schedule+ Interchange, which is explained in Chapter 30.

Another issue to deal with is the Macintosh. In some organizations, "religious wars" are waged over which platform is better for the end users as a desktop operating system. Most IS organizations agree that homogeneity would be a nice thing, but it rarely happens. Usually, only the largest organizations are able to justify standardization, because the support costs are so high. Small and medium-size organizations tend to allow a mix of PCs and Macintoshes because they want the employees to be comfortable with their computing environments.

A Macintosh Exchange Client software version ships 90 days after the public release of Exchange. To play it safe, wait for the client to come out and test it thoroughly before implementing Schedule+ in a heterogeneous Mac and PC environment. Make sure that both products have the same features and that the menus and buttons are the same. Documentation and training are somewhat more difficult to develop, in addition to educating the IS staff to support both platforms. You don't want to roll out software that people won't be able to use effectively.

Getting Everyone on Board

Getting the entire organization to accept electronic scheduling can be a daunting task for any IS group. This section covers some points that you should be aware of before you try to sell the organization on using Exchange and Schedule+ for electronic scheduling.

People resist change. In most cases, getting people to switch to a computer-based solution for scheduling is difficult, because scheduling is very personal to most people. Scheduling is something that people do every day; when they make appointments, they look at their day planners and find an appropriate time to schedule the engagements. People are used to the way in which they already work, so getting them to switch takes good salesmanship, a direct order, or a mixture of both methods. Rollout or implementation approaches are covered in more detail later in this chapter.

Getting your users to understand the benefits for both themselves and the organization is your goal. Getting everyone on board is important, because the success and effectiveness of the rollout depend on user participation and enthusiasm. For the introduction of any software to be successful, proper hardware, software, and training resources are required.

Training is the key element in this equation, because in the case of Schedule+, no additional hardware is required. You just need to purchase licenses for each copy of Schedule+ that you are going to run on the client. If the workstations in your organization already have licenses for Microsoft Office, the users are already licensed to run Schedule+.

You want to make certain that you give your users the correct amount and quality of training on this product. If your company makes a large investment in administrator and user training for Exchange, you want to make sure that you can leverage or take advantage of all that training by having people use all of the software features, such as scheduling, to their fullest potential. This achieves maximum return on the investment that your organization has made in Exchange technologies.

Rolling out Schedule+ only to have people not use it—or, worse, having only some people use it—is your worst nightmare, because Schedule+ is so integrated into Exchange. When User A schedules a meeting, for example, he sends an e-mail message about the meeting to User B. If User B accepts the invitation but then never launches Schedule+ to check his schedule, business suffers and productivity slips.

Conversely, if you get everyone using the product, you have a robust environment, in which productivity and effectiveness rise. Meetings become much easier to schedule, and tasks get accomplished on time.

You want to relate the concept or idea of a computer working environment to your users when you train them. The Exchange Client and Schedule+, combined with Microsoft Office, provide a tightly integrated environment in which users can remain all day. When the phone rings, Schedule+ is right there on users' desktops, enabling users to get contact management information, appointment times, and add tasks to their lists of things to do.

Suppose that Tom calls Jane, asking her who the East Coast sales representative is and what his fax number is. Jane, who is using Windows 95, selects Schedule+ from her taskbar, because it was already open. She pulls up "Find" from the "Edit" menu, clicks the "Contact List" radio button, and types in "east coast" and clicks "Start Search". Within seconds, the name and phone number pop up and Tom is on his way. From within Schedule+, Jane clicks the Exchange icon which brings up the client. From there, she e-mails Tom the information just to be sure. While in the client, she notices there is a new scheduling-related message in her box because of the special icon in front of the entry. Upon reading the message, she accepts an invitation for a meeting, and it is automatically scheduled for her. In the meantime, Jane's secretary has booked two appointments for her.

Scenarios such as the preceding example make the case for companywide use of Schedule+ as a desktop environment. The capability of Schedule+ to assign permissions to other users, as well as its breadth of scope, give users what they need to be productive. High levels of participation make scenarios like this commonplace within an organization. The technology needs to weave itself into the corporate culture.

Widespread acceptance of Schedule+ is the key to the success of the application implementation for several reasons. These reasons vary in importance from organization to organization, depending on the flexibility and knowledge of users, size or number of users, platform, and many other factors. After you read some of the examples in the following sections, you will get a better idea how to approach a Schedule+ rollout as part of the Exchange rollout.

Shared Schedules

You can give other users permission to view various aspects of your schedule. You may want to allow your secretary to make appointments for you, for example, but not to access your to-do list. The permissions system of Schedule+ is very flexible. You have complete control over the accessibility of a users schedule to a target set of users..

Group Meetings

Schedule+ makes scheduling group meetings very easy. Integration with the Exchange client enables you to generate e-mail to all the participants, both attendees required and optional, that when the message is read and accepted, automatically schedules the meeting on the participant's schedule. The system knows when people are busy and suggests an appropriate time when everyone can attend. This feature takes the guesswork and hassle out of planning meetings.

Microsoft provides the Meeting Wizard to help you plan your group meetings, schedule resources, and pick the right times. This walks a user through the key elements when scheduling a meeting; this includes attendees, resources like conference rooms and audio/visual equipment, and meeting agendas.

Contact Management

Have you ever written a letter and wished that you could paste the addressee into the letter from a database without a great deal of work? Schedule+ provides this function through its Contact List. You can enter information on all your personal contacts here in the Contact List and paste it directly into Microsoft Word, or other windows based application.

In addition, the Schedule+ Interchange allows you to import database information from any database that supports ASCII text files. This is the Contact List repository. By using the Text Import Wizard, you can easily step through the process to migrate all data from an Microsoft Access database, for example, and use all the contact information in Schedule+ and Word documents.

Another useful feature enables you to publish enterprisewide phone-book lists of contact information for the company or organization. You can post this ASCII text file in a public folder and load the contact list information into Schedule+, providing immediate access to the addresses and phone numbers of everyone in the company. It saves data-entry time and assuredly saves paper in the process. You can write scripts to automate the entire process so that updates can occur without inconvenience to the user.

To-Do Lists

Some people like to use sticky notes or post-it notes, to-do pads, or handheld Personal Directory Assistants (PDA), but having an integrated list of tasks right in your working environment makes things much easier. Schedule+ enables you to configure advance warning times or reminders and organize your tasks under or by project headings to give you an organized to-do system.

The task manager in Schedule+ provides a way to track the percentage complete, as well as any contact information related to a certain project. When the task manager is tied into the permissions features of Schedule+, you can have the following scenario.

Joe has his to-do list organized under several project headings. He becomes ill. Because Joe gave Tom rights to see his to-do list, Tom is able to pick up where the project left off, because the name of the contacts involved, as well as the status of all the pieces of the project, were entered into Schedule+.

This scenario is very realistic scenario if Schedule+ is widely adopted in your company and becomes part of the way that people work every day.

Extensive Printing Capabilities

Schedule+ provides many ways or pre-defined reports to print scheduling and contact information, ranging from printing the Contact List to printing daily, weekly, and monthly views of your schedule.

Enterprise Event Scheduling

Because Schedule+ is tightly integrated into Exchange, an entire year's worth of holidays and events for an organization can be entered one time, by one person, and distributed throughout the enterprise through the use of public folders. An example of this would be a business enterprise pay schedule and company vacation days on an annual basis. This way you can provide valuable information about company wide dates or events without having to publish paper calendars. This method of distribution is also more dynamic and can change as needed.

Scheduling of Resources

In many organizations, many resources need to be reserved, including conference rooms, audio/visual equipment, chairs, and tables. Schedule+ gives you the opportunity to create a schedule for these resources, allowing people to see when the resources are free, and make the reservations themselves. By using the permissions options of Schedule+, you can create a secure, tamperproof way to free time for the people who normally would reserve those resources for you. This eliminates the need in a company to have a person manually scheduling these types of resources.

In addition, the Meeting Wizard included with Schedule+ can automatically select a time when the resource is free if the resource is a "required" attendee. The wizard searches the Schedule+ system to find the next availability for the resource. The wizard will then make a recommendation of a meeting time when the resource can be used.

Now think about what happens if people don't use the program, or if some people use it and others don't. Meetings will be harder to schedule, because everyone involved can't rely on the participants to read the e-mail messages generated by Schedule+. Also, the Meeting Wizard might select a time when someone can't attend a meeting, because that person didn't enter his or her appointments into the system.

These issues are at the heart of the success or failure of Schedule+ implementation. It is imperative that everyone be committed to using the system every day; if they do not, it will make things harder, not easier. There are a couple of traditional approaches taken when deciding under what conditions to introduce new software. They are discussed in the next section of this chapter.

The "No Other Way" Strategy

In this strategy, a group of users—usually, the people who head departments or divisions—decides to introduce a new software package. This group structures communications in such a way that people must use the package to receive important information.

An example of this is the original introduction of e-mail into departments. The heads of the department decided that e-mail was the way to go, and provided the tools and training needed to make the transition. To garner support for the idea, they stopped sending paper memos regarding the times of meetings, and the status of projects. The people who weren't reading their e-mail were reprimanded for not showing up or being unprepared. This forced the late-comers to start reading e-mail. There was really no other way.

The use of Schedule+ can be effective regardless of the size of the organization because it forces compliance indirectly. Most people will be turned off if you just order them to do something. If you give the people who support the technology the freedom to use that technology en masse, the latecomers will see the light or the benefits of the technology. These new users will be ostracized from the group and ultimately will fall behind the technology. In addition, some late adopters of the technology wind up being the biggest supporters of technology developments; they just need to see all the benefits the software brings with it.

In some senses, this strategy may seem to be a bit forceful, but it allows users to decide for themselves in some degree. The key is getting support for the product with the user community in the pre-installation or planning phase of the Schedule+ rollout. A successful implementation requires involvement, not only from the IS department, but from the user community to drive the details of how the product will be used on a day to day basis.

The "We're Doing It This Way" Strategy

In some organizations, and especially in large organizations, information-technology policy is set from the top down. A huge capital outlay must take place when a technological direction is decided upon, so there is no room for IS or end user non-compliance with the corporate technology policy. Therefore, a great deal of research is done in these organizations to make sure that the company is moving in the right direction and that any changes that are made will result in productivity increases, cost reductions, and worker satisfaction. Beta tests are orchestrated, surveys are done, and some minor training is conducted by the team of peers from IS and the end user community charged with deploying this technology.

When a decision is made from IS, the upper management of a business unit, or another managerial body, users has no choice about whether to comply with the policy, which becomes "the way things are done." This type of policy makes training very effective, because everyone will be using the same product, usually on the same platform.

An example in which this strategy is apparent is in the choice of word processors and spreadsheets. Most large organizations pick one product for several reasons and make it the standard; everyone just goes along. Another example is when companies have standard forms for expenses and office supplies. Those forms are the way that the company does business, and employees have to use them. The incentive is, "If you want your money back, you must fill out this expense report." This managerial approach is not the friendliest one, but it tends to achieve the desired result if the proper training mechanisms are there to empower the user.

The "Sales" Strategy

Some organizations attempt to sell users on a concept, figuring that if the users feel that they are part of the decision-making process, the implementation will be more accepted, and, therefore more successful. In addition, the common thinking is that if users embrace the concept of a proposed change, the implementation will go much more smoothly than if the change was forced down users' throats.

The only problem with this approach is that if users don't particularly like the proposed solution for the wrong reasons—such as resistance to change in general, intimidation due to the scope of the software, or software complexity—you are getting slanted feedback. Be careful to pay attention to the tone of the comments that you are getting. As you talk with your users, keep in mind that your perspective as an information-technology professional is much different from theirs. Although you may see cost savings, increased productivity, and cutting-edge technology, they may see your proposed change as a completely new way of working that is counterproductive.

You can find examples of this in the implementation of carpool, telecommuting, and recycling programs in organizations. The organizers of those programs often ask for input from employees before they establish the programs. As it relates to information systems, this approach is often taken in the design of front ends or user interfaces for database applications, web pages, and help-desk systems.

These approaches should help you decide exactly how you want to implement the installation if you indeed decide to use Schedule+. Remember that you don't have to install and use Schedule+ to use Exchange. Perhaps a phased approach is right for your situation. Some users get information overload, and putting them through too much training in too short a time can result in burnout. In addition, extra time is available to the IS staff for supporting these users when you use a phased approach of implementation. You get to find out what the frequently asked questions (FAQs) are and can post those questions in a Exchange public folder when you implement Schedule+.

Although the topic of group scheduling discussed above pertain to the Exchange features of Schedule+, this product is still powerful for individual scheduling. If motivated users want to use Schedule+ to keep track of their days, contacts, and tasks, they can do that. Just make sure that those users do not use the functions that interact with other users, because the other users might not be using the program.

Given the fact that a local copy of their schedule exists, the user has the ability to use Schedule+ without employing the resources of the Exchange at all. If you want to use the Exchange server, however, Schedule+ keeps both the local and the server copies of your schedule in synchronization and is completely configurable. You can have Schedule+ resynchronize every so many minutes or upon exiting the application or system. You also have the option of initiating synchronization manually.

Viewing Other Users' Schedule+ Schedules

Schedule+ allows you to view other users' schedules, contacts, tasks, and events. This ability to view other schedules is a concern for the information-policy-making body of your organization, because certain privacy issues go along with permissions. Some of these issues are discussed in the following sections.

Read Permission Issues

When you assign read permissions to users, they can not only see that something is on your calendar, but also see all the information related to that entry. You have to keep these read permissions in mind when you configure permissions, because sensitive information can be compromised if the Private check box in the read permissions confgiration section is not used. You can easily forget to check that box and even more easily forget that other users may have read access to your schedule.

A worker might give his boss read access to his schedule, for example, so that the boss will know the status of projects and when the subordinate is busy. The worker might just put "Interview with Company B" in his schedule, and that can lead to major trouble. This example shows that the information available to be seen by other users can comprise personal information.

Modify Permission Issues

Giving a user modify permission means that he or she can move appointments around without your knowledge or approval. This set of permissions can open the door to finger-pointing when meetings are missed and deadlines aren't met.

You must structure your information policy in such a way that users cannot modify a schedule without verbal approval. This security model gives the system a deterrent that will make people think twice before making unapproved changes. Users will be forced to confirm changes made to their personal schedule by other users in this example.

Create Permission Issues

Giving a user create permission enables him or her to make appointments and enter information into your schedule. In most cases, this set of permissions is great for executives who have secretaries, or if two people share a schedule, or if you are scheduling a resource such as a conference room or an overhead projector.

You must understand the difference between create and modify permissions. Suppose that you want to set up Schedule+ so that people can schedule their own reservations. You assign create rights to the global group of users called Everyone so they can make reservations freely. This group simplifies wide scale distribution of permissions.

That part is simple. The hard part is making sure that no one has permission to modify someone else's reservation. The permissions in schedule+ get so granular, down to the object level.You have to keep close track or unwanted reservations or appointments might start moving around without your control or approval.

The preceding example isn't meant to deter you from deploying the product;it is meant to point out the difference between create and modify permissions and to stress the need to keep a close eye on permissions.

When they are planned and used effectively, the security permissions features of Schedule+ can be a real boon to productivity. These features allow people to delegate tasks to others and stay focused on what they need to do. They also facilitate a basic reservation system for conference rooms and equipment, eliminating the need for manual scheduling.

From Here...

We've tried to point some potential points of concern when deciding whether or not to deploy Schedule+ across the enterprise along with Exchange. These include:

By getting together with your users and information policy-making bodies you can come to an informed decision about what do and when. We discussed the three different approaches to instigating change when it comes to software. These consist of:

In addition, some issues about permissions and privacy were discussed. These issues are at the forefront of a lot of discussion regarding groupware technologies like scheduling. You want to have the greatest number of features that can make information accessible to more people to make them more productive. After reading this chapter, you will have a lot more to bring to the table for discussion about how you might proceed.

The following chapters provide more information related to Schedule+:

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