What it boils down to is that what you want to do isn't trivial to configure (not something I would recommend for a self-professed novice, because missteps in configuring IIS on your server can result in fairly severe issues), and isn't supported in Windows
Home Server (which already has a fully configured web server). Most likely the issue you're experiencing is related to permissions, which adds an additional level of complexity.
In general, though, what I would try is:
- Add the FTP service to your server.
- Configure a folder on your server to hold free/busy information.
- Secure the folder so that only authorized users can access files in it, and those users can both read and write those files.
- Publish that folder through your FTP server as e.g. ftp://rhysserver.homeserver.com/freebusy.
- Configure outlook to access your free/busy data via e.g. ftp://rhys:password@rhysserver.homeserver.com/freebusy/rhys.vfb
This might work or it might not. It should at least be close. I haven't tried it, however, and won't because there's a (significant) caveat: FTP is a protocol that is increasingly avoided because it uses unsecured (i.e. plain text) telnet as it's control
channel, through which all commands are sent. This includes authentication information. (In this case, you're embedding authentication information in the URL.) Any time you configure an FTP server, you should expect lots of hackers trying to break in.
My recommendation for an alternative is to look into either a hosted Exchange solution (possibly not overly expensive if you don't have many users) or switch to web based mail and calendar à la Google Calendar and GMail.
I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
