Schemax Calendar

Manage group calendars more easily in Microsoft Outlook

Schemax Calendar  Review

Schemax Calendar is an add-in for Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007. It helps you schedule meetings, manage resources like meeting rooms and equipment and forecast resource availability.You can view appointments as calendars, timelines or bar charts. Schemax Calendar works seamlessly within Outlook - you can double-click on appointments to edit them in Outlook and create new meetings from the Schemax Calendar display.Calendars can be view side by side or combined. When calendars are combined they become partially transparent and are superimposed on top of each other in an overlay view. The overlay view helps identify when people and resources are free and lets you quickly schedule meetings with multiple busy attendees. Meeting room capacities are displayed and when the number of attendees exceeds the room capacity the room is flagged to show it is too small. You can even add an arbitrary number of external attendees so room capacity needs can be properly determined.Bar charts can also be view side by side and combined. The vertical scale denotes the percent busy a resource is. When bar charts are combined the bars are stacked in a single chart resulting in an aggregate view. The bar chart can be colored and sorted by category, resource name or Outlook free/busy color.All the views can be filtered by category and shown as work week or full week and working hours or a full 24 hour day. Unlike Outlook which limits the time period to a day/week/month Schemax Calendar lets you view anytime period from one day to twelve months all in a single screen making it an excellent tool for long term forecasting.The user can zoom in or out of the display and can pan around the display when zoomed in. A reference calendar provides a useful context for the main display.Schemax Calendar can be used with or without Exchange Server and is compatible with Exchange 2003 or 2007.