Always have this week at the top of the Calendar?

We get a lot of questions asking how to display "this week" as the first week in the monthly calendar (so today is always in the top row), with most of the questions coming at the end of a long month. This view is not possible, at least as a default view. The Month view is designed to resemble a paper calendar and shows the current month in its entirety, beginning with the first week at the top. You can move the calendar using the scroll bar but as soon as you switch to another folder and come back, the view reverts to the default month view.

This always comes up at the end of long months in part because of a problem with long months - if you use compressed weekends and the month begins on Saturday or Sunday, the calendar spans 6 calendar weeks. Older versions of Outlook always display five weeks on screen and because the week containing the first of the month is always on top, the last couple of days of the month aren't visible. This happened in March and repeats again in August and November of this year.

Outlook 2007 eliminates the problem with long months and compressed weekends, and not just because it doesn't have a compressed weekend view. Outlook 2007 redraws the calendar to display the entire month onscreen. You may need to refresh the view by clicking the Month button.

Suggested Times and Autopick Next

Outlook 2007, when used with Exchange 2007, replaces the Autopick Next feature on the Scheduling Assistant with the Suggested times pane. A few people have complained about Suggested times and wanted to know if they could get AutoPick Next back.

Yes, there is one place where AutoPick Next still exists: on Plan a Meeting (Actions menu).

I'm not sure why these users don't like Suggest times, I think it makes it easier to find the best time for meetings, although it is a little "busy" and confusing at first. It makes it easier to schedule meetings, especially when all of the attendees aren't required at the meeting.

How it works: After adding the attendees to the meeting request, Outlook reads the attendees free/busy and populates Suggested times with the best times available on the selected date, listing the time and number of attendees who are available in that time period, sorted by the time periods with the most available attendees. The scheduling assistant grid displays the selected date, showing you everyone's availability. Click on any time under Suggested times and the picker moves, just like it does with Autopick Next.

If the selected date isn't going to work, pick another date in the thumbnail calendar. It's color coded to make it easier - white means best availability, darkest blue means there are few periods where all attendees are available. When you select a date in the thumbnail calendar the suggested times for that date fill the Suggested times pane and the scheduling grid jumps to that date, displaying the attendees free/busy. Just like Autopick.

Appointments are off an hour when using Blackberry Server

Just when you thought all the problems involving DST were over, they come back. This time the problem is for Blackberry users.

If BES is using the wrong version of CDO.DLL, BES won't know DST started earlier beginning in 2007, so all appointments in March will be of an hour. Note that updating the CDO.DLL on BES to the correct version will not automatically fix meetings that are currently 1 hour off, however, new meetings will have the correct time.

For more information and instructions, see
Outlook: Meetings are off by 1 hour during DST delta with BlackBerry Enterprise Server in the environment
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=969665