People Work with Multiple Calendars
With the introduction of shared collaborative workspace tools into organizations, the calendaring problem has become even worse. Sreenby quips that "a man with one calendar knows what meeting to attend, a man with two is never sure." Once involved with multiple corporate projects being run out of a SharePoint or QuickPlace team workspace, people can very quickly have six or 10 calendars. Until recently the integration of all of these calendars into a single consolidated calendar for users has been very poor. In commenting on recent changes in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, both Orchant, author of The Unofficial Guide to Microsoft Outlook 2007, and Karen Hobert, analyst at Burton Group, noted the addition of threading different calendars into a single integrated view was an important addition to Outlook 2007. "The overlaying of multiple calendars in Outlook 2007 is very helpful, and the color coding of different calendars enables people to quickly see what's related to what, notes Hobert. Orchant observes that while Outlook 2003 supported subscriptions to SharePoint team site calendars, they were only displayed side-by-side; "a pretty unusable combination."