[pfehringer]

Our nature center is running Office XP on all our computers (4 computers) which all run Windows XP pro. We run Outlook for our main scheduling calendar. We usually export an excell file from the main calendar to update the calendars on the other computers in Outlook. Last week the main calendar started screwing up. Here is what it is doing...

When trying to export the calendar to any type of file it will start the export and just before it finished it gives an error message that it can't export the file.

When you first open the calendar the page is missing appointments. If you click on another date and come back to today the missing appointments reappear.

What I have done to try to fix it without success...

I have used the installation disk to repair Outlook
I uninstalled Outlook and reinstalled it.
I uninstalled the entire Office program and reinstalled it.

Luckily I have not lost any of our data since we would be up a creek without our calendar. We are not certain exactly when the problem started, but it may have been when my computer illiterate boss tried to hotsync his palm pilot on the main calendar instead of on his own like I've shown him a million times how to do.

As a semi side note... does anyone have experience with Lotus Notes 8 as a calendar/network program? If so, do you think we would like that instead of Outlook?

Thanks in advance for any help to solve our problem and prevent our secretary from writing down all our programs by hand.

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question....what is your outlook system connecting to? exchange or an external pop mail system?

something else to check out would be SharePoint from microsoft....it requires you to have a windows 2003 (at least) server with some other things on it...but it's a VERY easy way to make an intranet site for your company...you'd be able to share documents, calendars, make company announcements (like for the christmas party or whatever) and all kinds of fun stuff...

there are two types...sharepoint server and just using sharepoint services....sharepoint server costs money and has some added features while the sharepoint services is free to use..

[dsenette]

question....what is your outlook system connecting to? exchange or an external pop mail system?

something else to check out would be SharePoint from microsoft....it requires you to have a windows 2003 (at least) server with some other things on it...but it's a VERY easy way to make an intranet site for your company...you'd be able to share documents, calendars, make company announcements (like for the christmas party or whatever) and all kinds of fun stuff...

there are two types...sharepoint server and just using sharepoint services....sharepoint server costs money and has some added features while the sharepoint services is free to use..

[pfehringer]

Our Outlook is connected to an external Pop mail system. I'll check out the SharePoint software, but would like to get this fixed until we can come up with a better system. Thanks!

[pfehringer]

Did everyone give up on me already? Does this mean there is no solution other than a stick of dynamite under the computer?

[dsenette]

no i didn't give up...just lost track

so our basic concern here is shared calendar access correct?

another free option would be google calendars Here

...kind of involves duplicate entry though...
with POP as your mail source outlook won't really share calendars correctly...if you were using exchange then you could just share them natively etc..

[pfehringer]

Actually our main concern here is getting the calendar to work. As stated in the original post, When trying to export the calendar to any type of file it will start the export and just before it finished it gives an error message that it can't export the file.

When you first open the calendar the page is missing appointments. If you click on another date and come back to today the missing appointments reappear.
Once we get the calendar working then we can worry about the sharing part.
Thanks

[Jonesey]

Right - a quick and dirty workaround.

Build yourself a calendar in Excel.
If you're at all familiar with Excel's date functions then this should be really easy to do - and you can go as far out into the future as you want.

When you've done, set the file up as a shared workbook.

Any changes made by anyone wll automatically get updated in the master version held on disc.

It's probably not what you want to hear and isn't 100% foolproof either - but you'll have calendar functionality until you decide what you're going to do about Outlook.

Running Outlook via MS Exchange is the ONLY way to do what you really want.