Microsoft Schedule+

» see microsoft.com/schedule as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i was in elementary school when schedule+ shipped, and by the time i was old enough to share a calendar with anyone, outlook had already absorbed it. schedule+ belonged to the windows 3.x and office 95 desktop, which was the era of installing office from a sleeve of floppy disks. i did meet that desktop later as a kid messing with my father office computer, but the calendar icon was not the one i clicked on.

schedule+ was first released in 1992 for windows 3.0 and classic mac os. it was bundled as the calendar companion to microsoft mail, the lan messaging product that preceded exchange. inside an office, you could open schedule+ on your machine and see the free-busy bars of colleagues who were also running schedule+ against the same mail server. that was the pitch. before this, scheduling a meeting meant calling people on a phone or walking down the hall.

the program shipped with office 4.x and office 95 and then with exchange client and windows messaging. version 7.5 in the office 95 box was the high-water mark. it had a recurring-appointment system, a planner view showing several colleagues side by side, and a contacts tab that stored phone numbers as flat rows. for the first half of the nineties it was the calendar a windows pc could be expected to have.

~ the case file ~

~ how outlook 97 ate it ~

outlook 97 launched on 19 november 1996 and was designed from the start as a single personal-information-manager client. it covered mail and calendar in one window, with contacts and tasks tabs alongside. the calendar engine inside outlook was effectively schedule+ rebuilt against the new mapi profile model. when office 97 shipped, schedule+ was demoted to a legacy applet for opening old.scd archives. the recurring-appointment dialog moved into outlook with the same field layout, which is one of the small reasons outlook calendar still looks like it was designed in the windows 3.x era.

a thin schedule+ binary kept shipping inside office 97, office 2000, office xp, and office 2003 for backward compatibility. by office 2007 it was finally cut from the install entirely. the program lived another ten years past its useful life as a conversion tool nobody opened.

~ what carried over ~

the cultural residue of schedule+ is the data layout outlook inherited. anyone who has ever sent a meeting invite from outlook has been touching a system whose internal model was written for windows 3.0 against a microsoft mail post office. it is also a reminder that the personal-information-manager category was once split into three or four applications shipping in the same box, before microsoft glued them together. the modern thing where you live inside one app for mail and calendar started with outlook 97 absorbing schedule+, not with gmail.

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