Is it possible to duplicate all calendar appointments to a central calendar?

Question

We use Exchange 2013 + Outlook 2013.

Currently, all of our users have their own separate calendar in which they plan appointments.

Due to the amount of employees, we would like to create a central calendar and make it so whenever a user plans an appointment in their own calendar this appointment gets duplicated/copied/synchronized to the central calendar.

This way our reception will only need to check one calendar to know which appointments to expect.

Does anyone know whether this is possible?

Answer 1

Out of the box its not possible to copy over appointments into another calendar. This is also not so easy as if you copy an element you might break stuff like (who is the owner, what is happing if the entry is canceled / rescheduled, need to calculate timezones, ... )

So you have the following options:

1. You could setup a taskuser (called e.g. Backoffice Calendar) and every user in your company need to invite that taskuser when inviting somebody via an calendar entry. This isn´t an automated solution, but via that way the reception has only one calendar to check. But your users needs to make sure that they include that in there invitations, so I really would go for option 2:
2. Why didn´t you come up with a "Room Ressource" which is handled by the reception? If there is then a meeting taking place the reception need to check and control the room resource mailbox. You users then need to include the room in there "invitations" and can also reserve the room. Your users can also see if the room is free or already booked and then need to choose another free slot. The reception can then approve the reservations making sure that VIPs are getting there time frame. On top of that the reception can then plan to handle the rooms, cook coffee put glasses in the room and such stuff.