What is Microsoft Schedule+?

Schedule+'s most notable strength is its simplicity. Users will take to it quickly and easily. When you log in. the program's main display shows a monthly calendar, a scrolling day timer, a list of users on the network, and a notes Held. Each of these four interface components is a fixed window into the data it holds, a characteristic that adds to Schedule+'s simplicity but at times detracts from its functionality.

In the day timer, you can scroll easily through the day's meetings but you can view only nine-and-a-half hours of a day at a time. In the monthly calendar, you can click on a button on to view months from prior or subsequent years or to view different months in the current year but you can view only one month at a time. Highlighted dates indicate that events are scheduled on that day, but you can't see how many events are scheduled until you click on the date.

You go to the user lists to select and view calendars of other users on the network. In the Personal and Local listings. you select among the names by scrolling through the entire list and manually checking each user whose schedule you want to view, which is a time-consuming process if you have a large network. However. Microsoft has made it easy for you to create your own Custom lists; you can add users by typing the first one or two characters of their name and pressing Return,

The program's scrolling notes field is very small, and it doesn't let you tag notes to any particular meeting. Nor can you view more-detailed notes easily without printing them out.

Yet despite these limitations, we found Schedule+'s minimalist approach a real plus when it came to actual scheduling tasks. The program is a good choice for both group and personal scheduling, as a personal scheduling tool. Schedule+ offers some advantages over single-user scheduling programs. Unlike Alarming Events, from CE Software, for example. Schedule+ doesn't force you to start with a blank day timer and fill in times for meetings. Nor do you have to fiddle with a day timer window that's separate from your monthly calendar. To its credit, however. Alarming Events tries let you view more than one month at a time.

For group scheduling, Schedule+ makes it wonderfully simple to check the unscheduled times of other users on the network. To do so, you simply select names by clicking or dragging in the lists and Schedule+ brings up a single or composite day timer view that shows one or more schedules. In addition to your own appointments, the daytimer displays the selected users' booked times by highlighting them in gray. You can then propose a meeting at a free time simply by selecting the hours and using the Mail Request command to send a Microsoft Mail message to the users, asking them to attend the meeting.

Schedule+ also lets you log on to a user's calendar and view the actual appointments, if you know the user's password (which can be different from the Mail password). Then you can hook meetings right into that user's calendar. What you can't do, however, is automatically schedule yourself or anyone else for regular events (such as a weekly 9 A.M. meeting) without manually cutting and pasting it throughout your calendar and the calendars of all the attendees.

Because Schedule+ is integrated with Microsoft Mail, it benefits from some of Mail's capabilities. For instance, you can enclose an unlimited number of documents and send them along with your Meeting Requests. Mail also lets you use Schedule+ to create specialized forms for booking rooms and resources.

But the integration with Mail also has some limitations. Schedule+'s data is stored on the Mail server, so you can't access it unless you're connected to the Mail system, which makes remote access a problem. Plus, if the Mail server crashes, you don't have the security of a locally stored copy of your schedule.

Miley, Michael. (November 1991). Schedule+ and Meeting Maker. MacUser. (pg. 58).

Download Microsoft Schedule+ for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II