Holidays no longer deployed by default in Outlook 2010?

Hello, I'm not an IT professional, but I was directed to re-post here. So I'm so hoping that a solution can be found as my IT department desperately needs guidance as they are neither understanding the severity of the problem nor how to fix it!!

Up until this particular job and the installation here of Office 2010, the holidays were deployed network-wide to everyone. My IT department was very obtuse last year and they refuse to see how serious it is that the basic holidays are not listed in our calendars by default, as has been the case for the past 15-20 years.  They're told me that I just have to go into options and click ... blah, blah, blah. With patience I advised them that _I_ know how to do this and even have maintained my own HOL file for years for my home Outlook version esp. after the dates ran out (2007 or so??) but they're not understanding that it's beyond reasonable to expect that several thousand employees have to do this themselves (many of whom are quite computer illiterate for this type of thing.)  I've tried to get them to understand that _they_ must do this for everyone as people are booking meetings on statutory holidays, etc., because even the Outlook boardroom booking calendars are missing this vital information. With your help, please let me know how I can guide my IT folks to do this. There are a couple of stat holidays coming up and I saw yesterday that a meeting had been booked on one of them as, as can so easily happen, since someone obviously booked that meeting using timeline criteria and not realizing that the holiday fell on a particular month and day. Too easy to do without the holidays showing up automatically in everyone's calendars! We've had Windows 7 now fully deployed in our govt dept for about 3 months now and I'm not going to let our IT people use that excuse again.  It was very valid before, of course, but no longer.   But I definitely would like to give them a starting point to resolve this, please, please!  It's time to seriously encourage them to fix this and I just need to let them know how easy it is to do system-wide - perhaps in one of the future maintenance windows that they're doing every couple of weeks or so. I know it has to be easy since I've been doing contract work for 25 years now and have moved between government departments and this is the first job I've ever had since MS Office has been used in the workplace that the holidays just aren't automatically found in one's installation.

Any information very much appreciated!

Thank you!

June 23rd, 2015 6:41pm

Hi,

I found something which should be helpful to your IT guys:

Add Holidays to Outlook's Calendar

To use a script or PowerShell to automate the holidays installation for users, see  Outlook Code: Importing bank holidays from an Outlook.hol based CSV file.

Please Note: Since the web site is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this information.

If the links above are not helpful, please be more specific with the detailed request.

Regards,

Melon Chen
TechNet Community Su

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
June 24th, 2015 1:59am

Hello and thank you for your response!  Appreciate it. <g>

Hi,

I found something which should be helpful to your IT guys:

Add Holidays to Outlook's Calendar

Thank you.  Yes, those of us who have been maintaining our own HOL files since the default ones shipped with Outlook stopped around 2007 or so, we know this process.  That is the solution my not-so-helpful IT folks proposed.

Can you imagine trying to teach every single, solitary employee to do this (# of employees numbers in the 1,000s)?????  They can't do basic stuff, often, imagine trying to get them to "install" the holidays themselves??  Phew.  I can't even begin to imagine the disaster that would be.  And the public boardroom calendars - don't know who'd take care of them, either.

At any rate, thanks for the link.  Others coming to this message for whatever reason might not know how to do this, so it's a great link to provide for those doing this manually on a home PC, or something.

To use a script or PowerShell to automate the holidays installation for users, see  Outlook Code: Importing bank holidays from an Outlook.hol based CSV file.

Please Note: Since the web site is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this information.

That sounds complicated.  Just a further question, how was this done in the past?  Was it done via these directions above, exactly?  We _always_ had the holidays installed by default in all installations of Outlook, even the boardroom ones in every government contract I've ever had up until this one.  That's why it was such a shock to find that not the case here with this Outlook 2010.  And to have had that response from IT, so very, very unhelpful.  Every single user is affected and they are acting very unwilling to provide a system-wide deployed solution while inconveniencing and impacting workflow involved with meeting bookings, etc., negatively.

If I approach my folks with this possible solution, is it a viable one, do you know??  Or anyone, esp. if that's backed up by years of experience like in past everywhere in corporate settings if this has been the only process to do this?

If it's _the_ tried-and-true way things have been done with MS Outlook since "time immemorial" <g>, more than good enough.  If it's only just a possible fix, would like to know ahead of time, please.

Thanks so much!



  • Edited by SGFan 10 hours 25 minutes ago
July 7th, 2015 5:05pm

I would say that your experiences in past organisations is due to the email admins there, performing this task on behalf of all users/mailboxes.
There is nothing built-in to do this.

Also, it's not specifically an Outlook thing, (Outlook has never done this by default), it's more of a server-side thing.

In the 20+ years I've been an IT Pro, I've never seen this done as a matter of course, but I'm sure it depends upon the organisation.
Here in Australia, we have a lot of regional variation in holidays, so it's difficult to get the holiday data correct for all scenarios.

I opened a MSFT Premier Support case for the bulk-holiday-injection topic some years ago, and there was no great answer at the time, other than similar suggestions as offered by Melon.

I just did a web search for: import holiday exchange server
and there are quite a few similar suggestions, along the same lines, which involve using a data file, scripts/commands, all applied by the email server admin to the email server, effectively injecting the holidays/events into all existing mailboxes. This doesn't resolve for any new mailboxes created after the scripts have executed, but there are also suggestions for that.

e.g.: http://blogs.technet.com/b/manjubn/archive/2012/01/14/holiday-calendar-and-how-import-to-mailboxes.as

July 7th, 2015 6:36pm

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