Hi Alan,
Perhaps you are already using these methods but if not, I have two suggestions for using Outlook for scheduling purposes with groups or teams that makes it a bit easier to look at visually and to foresee staffing issues.
Suggestion 1: On the group calendar, do not have the employee block the actual times for example; 12/20/24 from 7:30-Noon. Employees can and should block a section of time off on their own Outlook calendar view to prevent meetings from being scheduled but not the group calendar.

On the group calendar they should check the 'all day' box but write in the times out of the office in Title Field.

Looks like this on the group calendar.....

This keeps all the 'out of office' info up at the top of the calendar. It stacks the out of office info in a more visual user-friendly way than blocking the actual hours out on a given which gets compressed to a point that the calendar isn't helpful or readable.
Suggestion 2: If you have multiple cores or want to differentiate the lab staff versus the admin staff, you can color code by assigning color codes to each group by using the 'Category' options when they are putting in their out of office time. See red arrow.

In this example, you are looking at the group calendar view - Jane is a lab tech working in the orange or X core, and Joe is an administrator who works in the blue or Y core. Once these all start to populate in you can visually see your staffing levels better.

I hope this is helpful and allows you to continue to use Outlook for free instead of purchasing something and forcing users to have multiple calendars on different software platforms.
Cheers!
Amy
Out-of-Office Dates: 12/20/24-1/1/25
Amy Gilman (she/her)
CBSR Administrative Support
Center for Biomedical Shared Resources
University of Vermont – Larner College of Medicine
149 Beaumont Ave, FMRB 150A
Burlington, VT 05405
(802) 656-0813
https://www.med.uvm.edu/cbsr
