The improved calendaring feature in Exchange 2007 helps resolve reliability issues, enhance the scheduling process, and encourage more sharing of calendar information. Overall, these improvements make Exchange and Microsoft Outlook calendaring a more reliable, powerful, and efficient tool for time management.

Calendaring improvements have been made in the following areas.

Free/busy information

Improvements include:

• Up-to-date calendar information and secure free/busy information
  
  
• Additional free/busy information categories, including Pending and Unavailable
  
  
• New free/busy information metadata on titles and locations
  
  

Scheduling tools

Improvements include:

• Server processing of meeting updates
  
  
• Optimal time and resource suggestions
  
  

Calendar sharing

Improvements include:

• Cross-forest sharing of calendars
  
  
• Client caching of shared and delegate calendars
  
  

Meeting forward notifications

Improvements include:

• A notification is sent when a meeting request is forwarded
  
  
• Meeting attendees are added to the calendar when the meeting notification is received
  
  

For more information about calendaring, see the following topics:

• Managing Meeting Items
  
  
• Managing the Availability Service
  
  

Resource management in Exchange 2007 provides a reliable resource management solution that maps to information worker goals and increases organizational productivity.

Resource management improvements have been made in the following areas.

Booking and search services

Improvements include:

• Up-to-date resource
  
  
• Integration with Office Outlook 2007 meeting request process
  
  
• Ability to delegate management of resource policy to users using Outlook Web Access
  
  

Schedule management services

Improvements include:

• Policies and rules to control who can schedule and when they can schedule
  
  
• Scheduling workflow supporting manual approval
  
  
• Usage reporting and statistics
  
  

Enterprise-wide resource management services

Improvements include:

• Ability to create and manage resource schema
  
  

For more information about resource management, see Managing Resource Scheduling.

Improvements to the Out of Office feature let information workers respond to important communications when they are out of the office. In Exchange 2007, information workers can now send separate Out of Office messages to internal and external senders. Information workers can also specify if external Out of Office messages are sent to all external senders or only to contacts. Additionally, the Out of Office feature lets information workers schedule Out of Office start and end times.

Out of Office improvements have been made in several areas.

Next-generation Out of Office feature

Improvements include:

• Information workers can schedule specific time periods when they will be out of the office.
  
  
• Information workers can configure their Out of Office messages so that detailed information is returned to coworkers, but more generic information is returned to external contacts.
  
  
• For privacy reasons, information workers can specify that their Out of Office messages be sent only to a limited set of external contacts.
  
  

Administrative control over Out of Office generation

Improvements include:

• Out of Office blocking is integrated with spam detection.
  
  
• The Out of Office feature can now be configured to not send responses to senders of junk e-mail or Internet mailing lists.
  
  
• Out of Office messages can be turned on or off on a per-user basis.
  
  
• Administrator controls external domains to allow for external Out of Office messages, block external Out of Office messages, or treat the domain as internal so that internal Out of Office messages can be sent to that domain.
  
  

For more information about the Out of Office feature, see the Managing the Out of Office Feature.

To comply with legal, regulatory, or business process requirements, many organizations must process, filter, modify, and archive e-mail messages that are transferred to and from their organization and the Internet and between people in the organization. Administrators can use the messaging records management (MRM) features in Exchange 2007 to help users and the organization keep the messages they need for business or legal reasons and to remove those they do not need. This is accomplished through the use of managed folders, which are Inbox folders to which retention policies have been applied. The administrator or the user places these managed folders in the user's Inbox, and then the user sorts messages into the managed folders according to organization policy. Messages placed in these managed folders are then periodically processed according to the retention policies. When a message reaches a retention limit, it can be archived, deleted, flagged for user attention, or simply logged.

For more information about MRM, see Managing Messaging Records Management.