Is there a way to insert holidays into all users' Outlook calendars?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.