For clients using the rich Outlook experience a client side install is used to register an addin to Outlook, other than that there are no other client side objects. The client only needs Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer.

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Administration

1. What additional backup will I need for About:Time?

About:Time products leverage your existing SQL Server and Exchange data repositories so your backup strategies for those products will cover About:Time implicitly.

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2. Can I use Active Directory Groups to consolidate my About:Time roles and facilitate new user configuration?

Yes, but your Active Directory must be in 'Native mode' to allow Active Directory to traverse the groups.

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General

1. What do you mean by 'Smart Scheduling'?

'Smart Scheduling’ refers to the use of the About:Time optimized scheduling process. The scheduling mechanism is streamlined and requires minimal user interaction in order to produce appointment solution options that take into account all defined constraints against the resources.

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2. Will I be able to schedule resources right out of the box?

Yes, the About:Time products allow you to immediately leverage all mailbox enabled entities in your Global Address list. You'll want to extend some of those resources into About:Time to take advantage of the richer capabilities but you will be able to schedule right 'out of the box'.

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3. Will I be able to integrate About:Time with my other applications?

About:Time provides its full functionality through a web service to facilitate application to application communication.

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4. Does About:Time support reporting tools?

Yes, the About:Time web service can be used to provide XML structured data to reporting tools, and the About:Time repository is Microsoft SQL Server which is compatible with ODBC and SQL interfaces.

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5. What is an Activity?

Activities are templates that each site configures to represent the typical appointment requests. End users can then select these from the catalogue at scheduling time to pre-populate their requests with resources, names and duration. In the case of Activity Groups additional business rules can be added to the template to further enrich the request.

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6. What is an Activity Group?

Activity Groups are templates comprised of one or more activities.

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7. How or why would I use an Activity or Activity Group?

These templates streamline the scheduling process, they allow users to quickly 'grab' a set of resources and schedule it under a common and reportable name. The catalogue is also ordered in a structure that reflects the enterprises organizational model.

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8. What is a Resource?

A resource is any person, place or thing that requires scheduling. Examples for a person would include technicians or field service operatives, places could be clean rooms, medical treatment rooms or service bays and things could include all types of equipment from delicate electronic sensors to heavy duty construction vehicles.

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9. What is a Resource Pool?

A resources pool is a collection of like resources, it could include all the rooms on the floor of a building or all of the vehicles in a service fleet.

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10. How or why would I use a Resource Pool?

Resource pools are used to allow requests to span a large set of resources. If it really doesn't matter which one of a hundred resources is selected to fulfill a request then the pool allows About:Time to look across all of them to find the one that can fulfill your request. Pools also allow you to filter resources by their attributes, for example, if your request requires a technician with a particular certification then all members of the technician pool would be reviewed and only those members who hold that certification would be considered for the solution. The feature list is site configurable for each of the three primary resource types (People, Locations and Equipment).

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11. What do you mean by 'generic scheduling request'?

About:Time allows you to submit a request that can span a range of days or weeks and can specify pools of resources to draw from. About:Time takes care of finding which resources are available in your time range and provides those solutions back to you so you can make the final decision on the best solution. The generic request (freedom from specifying a specific time and resource) allows you to avoid brute force Calendar searches.

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12. How is About:Time any better than just scheduling resources in Outlook or Public Folders?

Scheduling resources in Outlook and Public Folders works pretty well for smaller resources bases, when your resource catalog gets large you need a powerful tool to allow your enterprise to keep scheduling from consuming FTE's and to ensure that your resources are working optimally, About:Time is that tool.

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13. How is all of this information organized?

About:Time allows each enterprise to organize their activities and resources in a heirarchy that reflects their individual organization whether it be a financial, departmental, geographic or some other structure. This structure is also used to apply access permissions for your users.

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Troubleshooting - Installation

1. Why do I receive the message 'Method "~" of Object "~" failed' when the install kit was creating the COM+ application.

The password for the ATSystem account has been entered incorrectly during the install process. Uninstall the application and then restart the installation and ensure that the password for the ATSystem account is specified correctly in the installation process.

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2. Why do I receive the message "Access is Denied" when the install kit is registering the Event Sink.

The account that is running the install kit must have "Send As" and "Receive As" permission on the Exchange Mailbox Store. Refer to the "Pre-installation procedures section of the install guide for instructions on granting this access."

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3. Why do I receive the message "Handling of this ADSVALUE type is not yet implemented (type = 0xb)" during the install process.

Synchonization between the new web site and your Active Directory is not complete, restart the web on the About:Time application server.

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4. Why do I receive the message "Event Registration Failure - The specified event sink (ProgID: %1) is not allowed to run in-proc."

This is caused by a delay in Active directory propagation, wait 5 to 15 minutes and try again. If rebooting the application server is an alternative that process should resolve the issue as well.

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5. Why do I receive the message "ActiveX cannot create object” when I’m running the About:Time for Exchange Server setup on a client workstation?

This message occurs due to an activation error in the workstations Outlook configuration. Please refer to the following instructions to carry out the manual registration of the Outlook form.

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Troubleshooting - Application

1. Why aren't notifications coming to our Exchange based resources?

Notifications are sent from the account specified as the ATMailer account in setup. Verify that the account has an initialized Exchange profile by logging into Outlook as that user.

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2. Why does Timezone show as undefined when I schedule an appointment?

The default timezone has not been specified on the Application Settings page, update that field and try again.

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3. Why is the About:Time Global Address List (GAL) display not showing all of our GAL entries?

GAL access is subject to security, verify that the ATSystem account has 'read' permission to the Active Directory objects required.

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4. Why is Free/Busy information not available on my Small Business Server (SBS) installation?

Some default installations of Exchange on SBS specify Forms based authentication which interferes with the About:Time queries, please refer to http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;817379 for a resolution.

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5. Why are About:Time appointments opening in the default Outlook Appointment form?

The Outlook Forms cache can become unreliable, Clear your Outlook Forms cache (tools/options/other/advanced options/custom forms/manage forms/clear cache), or delete and re-create the mail profile.

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6. Why don't I get any solutions for my appointment request?

The main reason that you may not get solutions for your appointment request is that one or more of the required resources is not available in the timeframe specified. You can review the availability of the resources via About:Time or you can expand the timeframe to allow the system to search farther to accomodate your request. Another reason may be that there is no overlapping time available between two or more resources. If possible use Resource Pools to allow the system to investigate a much wider number of resources for your solution.

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Revised: January 18, 2008.

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