importing categories when subscribing to a project

J

Jerry Remkes

I've recently set-up an office calendar. Every appointment in it
belongs to a certain project. Every appointment is also set to one or
more categories which relate to the office staff involved. So my
10-o'clock appointment tomorrow for instance says: project: budget,
category: jerry. The next one says: project: marketing, category:
erin. And so on.

My purpose was to share this calendar with the rest of my office
staff. Everyone would be able to see both their own appointments and
those of the others, selecting on categories and/or projects. However,
though it is possible for my office staff to subscribe to any of my
shared projects, entourage does not subscribe to the specific
categories that I use in my project. So in practice my office staff
sees all the appointments in the shared projects, but loses all the
differentiation on whose appointment it is.

I noticed that the Sync Entourage-iCal script does copy also the
categories, so I've tried to go around this by first syncing with
iCal, then syncing with my Mac.com account, then having the office
staff subscribing to my iCal on Mac.com and after that having them
sync their iCal with their Entourage. Unfortunately the Sync in
practice doesn't copy the Entourage without faults, about 10 percent
of the material gets mangled in some sort of way. Moreover, it seems a
rather complicated way of something which you'd expect to be very
simple when everyone involved is operating within the same program.

Does anyone have a solution on how to my categories to different
subscribers of my shared project? Or any other tips on how to
accomplish in a more simple way then through iCal and Mac.com?

Jerry Remkes
 
P

Paul Berkowitz

I noticed that the Sync Entourage-iCal script does copy also the
categories, so I've tried to go around this by first syncing with
iCal, then syncing with my Mac.com account, then having the office
staff subscribing to my iCal on Mac.com and after that having them
sync their iCal with their Entourage. Unfortunately the Sync in
practice doesn't copy the Entourage without faults, about 10 percent
of the material gets mangled in some sort of way.
Click to expand...

It shouldn't get mangled. Write me privately with the details. Are you sure
that it's not iSync doing the mangling in the iCal-.Mac-iCal part of the
process, rather than the script on either end Entourage-iCal or
iCal-Entourage?

Moreover, it seems a
rather complicated way of something which you'd expect to be very
simple when everyone involved is operating within the same program.
Click to expand...

Except it's by design, not a bug. The people that designed Projects and
Project Sharing specifically chose not to share categories because they
figured that everyone would want to use their own categories. Think about
it: there are surely many contacts who appear in your project who also have
a relationship with you outside the project. They may have more than one
category - some of the categories might be "Work" or "Personal" or "Medical"
or whatever. If categories were shared, then they'd appear with the same
categories on all your colleagues' computers. Not only that, their Entourage
might have to create a "Medical" category for them - maybe 17 such
superfluous categories. Don't you think they'd feel "invaded" by all these
new categories and categorizations? they might blame you, or they might
blame Microsoft, but they probably wouldn't like it.

It's an interesting puzzle. perhaps in later versions we might get
sub-categories defined just for Projects, which are shared, but other
categories ignored. That would be a good feature request you could make in
Help/Send Feedback. These are still early days for Projects...

In the meantime, as a make-do, I'd suggest that you prefix or append the
category name in brackets to the title of each item, e.g.

[Subset 1] Whatever

Your colleagues might then choose to filter on <Name contains [Subset 1]> in
the various lists (Contacts, tasks, messages, etc. - you'd need a custom
view for Calendar Events by Project), and assign an identically-named
category to all the filtered items, if they'd like to have the color-coding
that categories provide.



--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.
 
Top