Peace be with you all!

I am wondering how to set up Outlook calendaring to prevent the need
for
our programming group (~12 folks) to have to send invites to everyone
for every vacation we are planning.

For example:  I am going to take 3 days off in July, so currently I
send a
meeting request to everyone (which they accept) so it gets added to
their
personal calendar.  What I feel would be best would be for us to
somehow
publish certain 'public' events to a common calendar that only our
group
could see.  As well, we currently need to set up two different events
for
the days we'll be gone:  one for our own calendar ('out of office')
and one
for everyone else (time is considered 'free') that is sent to
everyone.

As an added feature, it would be nice for our Manager to be able to
approve/deny our request within this system.

Opinions?  BTW, it's Outlook 2002 with Enterprise Vault (whatever that
is.)

Thanks in advance,
Robert