Shared diaries, team diaries, etc explained.

Shared diaries, team diaries, resource-booking diaries.
I'm just working out how many different uses we put our diaries to, how we use the shared diaries to best effect.
1. We're a small team of four people and we need to be able to see the 'team diary' so as to ensure we always have 'the office' covered.
2. We need to be able to book shared resources in the resource diary eg the projector and the lightweight eee PC or the meeting rooms.
3. Personally each of us plans our working time in and through the diary and we can 'invite' other team members to a meeting. (This automatically sends them an invitation and in Outlook they can confirm or decline the meeting - this automatically adjusts the diary entry.)
4. The eLink shared diary allows you to enter your travel to and travel from time for better diary planning plus the integration with Outlook enables you to enter a default alarm warning time,(i use 15 minutes.)
5. The diary and all contacts related to any diary entry are synchronised via MS Outlook to our PDAs. This synchronisation also extends to the Outlook warning and the entry and alarm is repeated through our PDAs.
6. When we book a meeting we have software which automatically sends a confirmation email ,within the hour, and then sends a re-confirmation three days prior to the meeting.
7. Actions which need to be on a particular day are entered in the diary and we can block a chunk of time for each of them.

All the documents needed for any meeting can be electronically attached to the diary entry so that I can prepare myself progressively.
All the diary entries show up in the relevant contact records, company records, project records etc
After a meeting the diary entry can be duplicated into an action(s) so that all the links are repeated and the individual person(s) can take responsibility for their particular action(s), so we can all see 'who's doing what'.

Other people we know use them to allocate truck and crane drivers to projects / jobs as customers need them; book electronic instruments to jobs; schedule crane and lifting inspections for insurance purposes; plan routine car and lorry servicing; plan meter readings......

Yes, that's all very well, possibly the, most important parts - every diary entry and action can be linked to a project, a person, a company, a marketing campaign, a sales opportunity, which means that you automatically get a schedule of all the work you've done or anyone's done or doing from any of these areas.

Beyond that let's have some dashboards for todays work - diary, to-dos, recent contacts, recent companies, recent projects, recent documenst and let's have a dashboard for a contact eg recent actions, open documents, open helpdesk issues, open sales opportunities, so I can see everything we may want to talk about and then we'll need to look at from the whole company view. Yes, it's all there.