Are you free, Mr. Kay?

At the office, we use Exchange.  I've been a fan of Exchange since the first time I administered an Exchange 5.0 server for 200 users.  Now, I work on a team that supports 15,000 users!  Being the third level support for Exchange, the members of my group use Outlook a little more intensely than your typical worker.  But...not everyone. :)

For example, if we're going to be on PTO, aside from letting our supervisor and HR know, we have to let the team know.  We could easily setup a team calendar to handle time off information, but we find it's just easier to send each other all day appointments with titles like "Tony - PTO".  What we normally do is set the busy information to "Free" before we send it out so that it doesn't block off our coworkers days.  Sometimes, though, folks forget to do that and I'll end up with entire weeks blocked off and project managers screaming because they can't find any free time in my schedule.  Deciding today I'd had enough, I wrote a little program to take care of this for me.  What the below VB does is open my Outlook calendar and iterate through all of the items in there.  It checks the subject line, and if it contains "PTO", it then checks to make sure it's set to free (BusyStatus of 0).  If not, it changes it, saves it and then writes the subject/free/busy again to confirm it's been changed. 

Imports Outlook = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook

Module Module1

    Sub Main()
        Dim objOLApp As Outlook.Application
        Dim objOLNS As Outlook.NameSpace
        Dim objCalendar As Outlook.Folder
        Dim colItems As Outlook.Items
        Dim objappointment As Object

        objOLApp = New Outlook.Application
        objOLNS = objOLApp.GetNamespace("MAPI")
        objOLNS.Logon("", "", False, True)
        objCalendar = objOLNS.GetDefaultFolder(Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.olFolderCalendar)
        colItems = objCalendar.Items
        For Each objappointment In colItems
            If InStr(objappointment.Subject, "PTO") Then
                If objappointment.BusyStatus <> 0 Then
                    Console.WriteLine(objappointment.Subject & " " & objappointment.BusyStatus)
                    objappointment.BusyStatus = Outlook.OlBusyStatus.olFree
                    objappointment.Save()
                    Console.WriteLine(objappointment.Subject & " " & objappointment.BusyStatus)
                End If
            End If
        Next
    End Sub

End Module


It's not the most efficient code, I know.  But, it went through my calendar in about 30 seconds and changed a few hundred entries.  I had planned on using it just this once, but it might be a good thing to schedule to run once a week or so.  Now, I have LOTS of free time for my PMs to fill up!  Oh, wait, that might not be a good thing.... :)