Welcome to TechnoBabble, a new bi-weekly feature on the Inside Groove blog. TechnoBabble will explore the latest innovations and new applications of softwares and electronic technology that are of interest to us at the Improve Group.

This week I want to share a feature in Outlook that we have recently implemented to help us manage our technology resources. Improve Group staff go on a lot of site visits locally, in-State and in other major cities. We have seven laptops that adequately support our staff on these site visits. However, it has been getting difficult to manage the laptops and to know who is planning on taking them out of the office, especially when there are multiple site visits in the same month or week.

To solve this problem, we created user accounts for each laptop on our Windows Small Business Server and shared their Outlook calendars with all staff. After creating each user account, I logged in as each laptop, opened their Outlook and clicked “Share My Calendar.” Then I set up each Improve Group employee with the Author Permission level; this way we can each create “appointments” to reserve any of the laptops. Lastly, each staff member clicked “Open a Shared Calendar” in their own Outlook and chose the laptops’ calendars. Now, it is easy to reserve laptops far in advance or to see how many are available for last-minute needs.