Windows Phone Thoughts: Outlook Calendar Sharing With PageThink's Calshare

A long, long time ago, there was a product named Outlook 97. Now, if memory serves, Outlook 97 was the first version of Outlook to support folder sharing. This innovative feature allowed you to specify any Outlook folder (calendar, contact, tasks, etc.) and select another Outlook user that you wanted to share it with. When you made a change to that folder, it would send out a special email that the other Outlook user would recieve, and it would update their folder. Clever stuff! It wasn't perfect, and sometimes things would go wrong, but ultimately it gave people Exchange-like functionality for free. Which is, I believe, why Microsoft removed the feature when they released Outlook XP. :evil: Microsoft wanted to drive Exchange adoption and kill anything that replicated Exchange functionality.

I remember being pretty ticked off at Microsoft when they removed that feature, because I had come to rely on it personally, and had integrated it at the office of the church I attend, all to great effect. But it didn't make any sense to keep an old version of Outlook for one feature when we were upgrading to Office XP. So I abandoned the concept of folder sharing from without Outlook sans Exchange server. But all is not lost! A company named PageThink has come up with an Outlook plugin that replicates this functionality, and best of all, it's free! There's not a lot of details about the type of functionality it offers, or how flexible it is, but it's worth a look.