How to set up Free/Busy in Microsoft Outlook

If you want to see attendees' availability in the calendar when planning an event, the Free/Busy option can help you achieve that.

How it works in WebClient

1. Log into your WebClient, navigate to Calendar and create an event

2. Specify when the meeting is going to happen and invite someone to attend

3. Once you enter the attendee's name, by looking at the right-hand side of this window, you will see if the attendee is free or busy (if you see any records there, the attendee is considered to be busy)

How it works in Microsoft Outlook

1. Make sure you have installed our addon for Outlook called Outlook Sync first. It is not going to work with standard IMAP or POP accounts.

2. Click on the Free/Busy options button in calendar settings in Microsoft Outlook (see below).

3. Enter the following string under "Search location" in the following format. Replace only our server address "x1sola.onice.io" with yours and make sure "Publish at location" remains unchecked (see below).

If you receive an error "The free/busy period you want to make visible to others is not valid. You can only publish the free/busy period from 0 to 36 months. Enter any number from 0 to 36", temporarily activate Publish at location: by the checkbox, change the present value to 0 and deactivate the Publish at location: again by checkbox afterwards.

https://x1sola.onice.io/freebusy/?%NAME%@%SERVER%

4. In the next step, create an event where you invite an attendee via the Appointment menu "Invite Attendees". Once you enter the attendee's email, you should see his availability under the "Scheduling Assistant" (see below).

Please note that IceWarp only shows the first 30 days of information by default. Should you want to extend this value, modify the index.html under the IceWarp installation folder "IceWarp/HTML/Freebusy".

Look for the following line in the file and set the number of days you want to see.

'$to = $from + 30'

More information about Free/Busy options is available on the Microsoft site under KB291621.