Does anyone know of a way to insert holidays from a .hol file into the Outlook calendars of all our users?
I know that Outlook has holidays for all countries which just need to be manually added by the user. In South Africa, holidays which fall on a Sunday cause the following Monday to be a holiday as well, which Outlook's standard holiday list does not take into account.
We have a custom .hol file which adds these bonus Monday holidays, but I can't find a way to add these to the calendars for all users without user intervention.
The command line option outlook.exe /hol <file.hol> is the closest I've come to a solution, but it still requires user confirmation.
Clients are using Outlook 2003/2007 and the server is Exchange 2007.
Edit: To clarify, this needs to be done in the user's security context, via a login script or similar. I cannot do this server-side due to mailbox permissions which cannot be changed for non-technical reasons.
You can make a pst file containing the holidays events, and import it into mailboxes using the Import-Mailbox cmdlet.
This article has informations on doing this using Exmerge and provide a VBScript to duplicate the PST with the correct mailbox.nickname for the import step.
Next for the import phase you may have a look at this article on the MSExchangeTeam Blog regarding the cmdlet replacing Exmerge in Exchange 2007.
Hope this fits your needs.
This seems like it should be reasonable feature in Exchange. I'm trying to do something similar, and it looks like the only options are 3rd party options.