Calandar work day not designed for night shift employees

Question

_{Thursday, January 9, 2014 9:13 AM}

When trying to set up my calandar work week and the work schedule I am asked to enter my work days and my start and end time. I work the night shift and my day starts at 10pm and ends 6:30 am the next day. This is my schedule and I can not enter it because it tells me "End date you entered Occurs before the start date". This happens in the OUTLOOK OPTIONS Calander Tab.

What can I do to be able to set up my work week and work time so when others check my schedule they can see when I am available?

Thanks,

Jeremy Lock

All replies (2)

_{Friday, January 10, 2014 5:48 AM ✅Answered}

Hi,

If you attempt to define Calendar working hours that span midnight in Microsoft Outlook, you will receive the following error message:

The end date you entered occurs before the start date.

This behavior occurs because Outlook does not allow you to define a calendar work day that spans midnight.

We can refer to the kb below to find a workaround:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/196804/en-us

Regards,

Melon Chen
TechNet Community Support

_{Friday, March 25, 2016 6:59 AM}

The workaround does not apply to this case; the remediation listed in the article states to create multiple tasks or events to cover the time span. The first task/event ends at midnight, and the second begins at 0:00 hours the next day.

This does not work for Exchange since it doesn't allow you to specify multiple shifts(one way to fix the problem).

A better solution would be to have the UI show the "shift" on a weekly calendar with sliders to allow you to adjust each "day". This would minimize the needed error checking and let you pick whatever start/end times you want. The only concern would be "4th shift" which is for those who start their work week more towards the end of the week and end early the next week. It should still be doable if you allow the person to select the start and end days but would need to be handled differently.

An ideal scenario would be to allow exchange to plug into a 3rd party scheduling system for organizations that have employees with "flex" schedules that change from week to week.