Sharing Free/Busy across the cloud

Are you free?

More and more institutions are beginning to realise the importance of connected, collaborative working, and the value of enterprise email and deciding whether 1, or many tenancies is the right option can be tough. Sometimes, for very good reasons, you need to split up your users into different tenants in Live@edu. Perhaps you want to have a tenant for staff, and one for students – or perhaps you want to keep your staff on your local server. So what about when you want to create a meeting with someone in your institution who is on the other tenant; for example a student wanting to book a 1:1 with their tutor?

It is possible to share free/busy status across two Live@edu tenancies using federated delegation – all it takes is a bit of PowerShell:

Get-FederationInformation –DomainName <the other Live@edu tenant> | New-OrganizationRelationship –Name <the other Live@edu tenant> -FreeBusyAccessEnabled $true -FreeBusyAccessLevel LimitedDetails

You can find out much more by visiting the tech article on Outlook Live Help. If you’ve not used PowerShell before you can find out all you need to know in relation to Live@edu on Outlook Live Help, too!

How do I look?

As you can see from the image above, by adding the email address of the other party (alex.roland@university-id.co.uk in the example) to our meeting request we can flick over to the scheduling assistant and see exactly when that person is free, tentative or busy – making booking meetings so much easier; no more emailing or phoning to see if they’re free, you can see it all in one place easily.

It is also possible to achieve the same effect with an on-premise Exchange server although this is a bit more involved. Steve Goodman, from Aston University in the UK, has written a great blog post detailing how to do it.