Force outlook to refresh/update calender more often?

I work as a sys-admin at a lawyer office. They have a lot of meetings and their schedule is very important to them. Outlook 2007 does a fine job. The server is Windows Server 2003 running Exchange 2003.

The problems are with the secretaries, who have to keep track of virtually all the calenders. This works by making some group calenders plus making all calenders "shared".

I do have a problem, though, and that is the time it takes for a refresh. It simply takes too long, from a person updating his/her calender to the secretaries having the most recent schedule. Fifteen minutes or so is not acceptable.

Is there any way to make the calender in Outlook update more often? Or simply a force update option (think of F5 in a browser).

I desperately need it and google has only articles on "slow outlook" and similar. There aren't many articles about the calender - nor can I find a lot of settings/customization in Outlook 2007.

Solution 1:

You can change the 15 minute free\busy update interval in Outlook by going in to the Options>Preferences tab>Calendar Options>Free\Busy Options> and setting the update interval to a time that suits you. Take note that if you have a large number of mailboxes with a large number of calendar items that shortening the interval may put a load on your server as the Outlook clients publish their entire shedule at this interval. The update is a Full update, not an incremental update.

Solution 2:

Is the issue with viewing calendars directly, or with seeing availability.

If it's with seeing the calendars directly, disabling cached mode on all involved clients should eliminate consistency latency (at the expense of overall system performance and latency on opening a calendar).

If it's viewing availability, upgrading to Exchange 2007 will allow Outlook 2007 clients to use the availability service (real time) rather than the client-published free/busy data in the hidden public folder. As a bonus this also allows more granular permissions for which appointment data is available to individuals viewing availability.