Create an Outlook Resource Calendar for Administrators to create, review and update a Master Schedule for students and teachers.

Question

My professional school sends a number of different students and teachers to variety of different settings for various sub-courses. Each sub-course is scheduled by a different person and when the students and teachers aren't in a sub-course, they have their "regular" responsibilities. My goal is to create a master scheduling program that performs the following functions so that teachers and students know where they are supposed to be and the planners for "regular" responsibilities also know where everyone's schedule to (1) avoid double-booking and (2) better coordinate class cancellations (mostly due to COVID). I plan to use Excel because (1) I am most familiar with it and (2) I don't know that MS Access or Outlook already has such a functionality.

The program would do the following:

1. Receive sub-course schedules in an Excel file with a specific format with time, date, location, sub-course title, teachers and students
2. Create a master list of sub-course sessions in Excel
   1. Identify whether a person is already booked at that time

        1. Generate Outlook invitations to those sessions for students and teachers
      
                             1. ii Share sub-course sessions with the people who generate the schedule for "regular" responsibilities
      
                             iii. Share upcoming sessions with administrators so that those students and teachers are appropriately relieved from their "regular" duties
      

3. Send reminder emails prior to each session – possibly the week prior to the session?  I think that this will be done semi-manually, as in you would need to push a button <SEND NEXT WEEK’S SESSION REMINDERS>.  I don’t think that I can automate it further than that.
4. Send all invitations from and to an Outlook ‘Resource Calendar’ that various administrators could view to identify what students were in sessions on a given day in a calendar format rather than the Excel list.

I have loosely achieved all of the above, except for setting up the Outlook ‘Resource Calendar’ that administrators could access. Without it, a single admin would be needed to send all of the invitations and if that person is sick, on vacation, or leaves the school, the whole program would die. I really need help with that portion, unless there is an existing solution that I can implement.

Answer 1

Hi @Teach-ah213 ,

To create a shared resource calendar, you need to have Microsoft 365 administrator permissions, and then follow these steps:

• In the Microsoft 365 admin center, select Resources > Rooms & equipment.
• Select Add resource.
• Enter the name, email address, capacity, and other information for the resource calendar.
• Select Save.

After creating the shared resource calendar, you can add it to your calendar list in Outlook and set up its permissions and options. To add the resource calendar, you can follow these steps:

• In Outlook, select the Calendar icon.
• On the Home tab, choose Add Calendar > From Address Book.
• In the Add Users dialog box, enter or select the name of the resource calendar, and then choose OK.

To set up the resource calendar’s permissions and options, you can follow these steps:

• In Outlook, right-click the resource calendar, and then select Properties.
• In the Calendar Properties dialog box, select the Permissions tab.
• You can add or remove users who can share the resource calendar and assign them different permission levels.

More information, you can refer to this official document: Create and manage room mailboxes.

To send reminder emails prior to each session, you may need use a macro to achieve it. Please kindly understand that the Outlook tag here we mainly focus on general issues about Outlook desktop client and know little about development, it is suggested for you to post a new thread with "Office Development" tag.

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