Creating an appointment

You may enter appointments into a BSCW calendar to organize events of different types (pri­vate dates, group meetings, telephone conferences). An appointment is described by at least a date and a name. If the appointment concerns a group of people, you may specify its partici­pants. Upon request, the participants are invited automatically, and their individual status (ac­cepted, declined) is managed along with the status of the appointment itself. Besides name, date and eventual partici­pants, you may provide additional information about the appointment like a category, a de­scription or a location.

•      To create a new ap­pointment inside a calendar, select  File    New    Appointment  in the top menu, click  in the ac­tion shortcut bar or click  in the day entries of a week or month view.

•      The ‘Add Appointment’ action form has five sections where to enter different kinds of in­formation concerning the new appointment.

•      ‘Appointment’: Enter name and op­tionally tags and description. Further you may specify:

•      Category, Priority: Select a category and the priority of the appointment. Appoint­ments of different cate­gories may be displayed in different colours (see 7.1.6 Calendar options).

•      Date/Time: Enter date and time of the appointment. Optionally you may also specify the end of the appointment and the time zone.

•      Location: enter the physical location of the appointment (if applicable).

•      Status: specifies the status of an appointment (tentative, confirmed, cancelled). Choose ‘confirmed’ if the appointment will take place regardless of whether in­di­vidual participants decline their participation. The default status ‘auto­matic’ means that the status is initially set to ‘tentative’ and then is changed automatically when all participants have confirmed or declined.

•      ‘Participants’: The participants of the appointment may be chosen as you would choose users when inviting new members to a workspace: you can choose from your address book, enter user names directly or conduct a search for users. Tick the re­spec­tive check box if you want to have the participants invited by an email message. When inviting to an appointment of a group calendar, you may of course also invite persons who are not members of the group calendar’s workspace. If you plan to attend to an appointment that you are about to create, don’t forget to invite yourself: you are not a participant by default!

•      ‘Details’: Here you may specify some online tool to be used in a virtual meeting.

•      ‘Recurrence’: Here you may specify a series of recurrences of the appointment you are about to create. This is done via rules of various types (e.g. weekly, weekly on certain weekdays or monthly on certain days of month) that may be selected from the ‘Add Rule’ list box. By clicking on [Add Recurrence] you get a rule field that you fill in ac­cording to your needs. In the same manner you may add more rules that generate fur­ther recurrences of your appointment. If you want to exclude some dates from the re­currences of the appointment you have to generate exceptions: choose a rule, click on [Add Exception] and specify the details in the respective exception field.

•      ‘Reminders’: Here you may specify a reminder email message to be sent to yourself, the participants of the appointment or the members of your workspace. Select the persons the reminder is to be sent to from the ‘Add Reminder’ list box. By clicking on [Add], you get a reminder field that you fill in with the details of the reminder (when, how often, to whom). You may also attach a personal note to the otherwise automatically generated reminder message. You may specify several reminders to be sent at different times to different numbers of people by repeatedly hitting [Add].

•      Confirm with [OK] to create the appointment according to the specifications made so far. All properties of the appointment may also be specified and changed at a later point in time.