Creating and changing an appointment scheduling

You create an appointment scheduling as follows:

•      Select  File    New    Appointment Scheduling  in the top menu.

•      In the ‘General’ section of the ‘New Appointment Scheduling’ action form, that is shown now, you specify the following details of the appointment.

•      Name and optional description.

•      Suggested dates: Select the dates for the appointment. Use the drop-down menus or click on the calendar icon to activate the calendar tool. Time fields may be left open. You may add a remark to your dates, e.g. on the place or duration of the pro­posed appointment, which will also be shown to the participants. Use the [Add date] button to add more dates if three are not enough.

•      Details for participation and emails: Enter the end of the voting period (voting on the appointment schedule starts immediately after the appointment scheduling has been creat­ed). Specify whether and when you want to be reminded of the end of the voting and whether you want to notified of each voting.
You may further allow parti­cip­ants to add or suggest further participants, who then have to be confirmed by the organizer or not. The available options and default settings depend on the configuration of your BSCW server.    
Specify whether participants are allowed to vote on a date with “maybe” (in addi­tion to the simple yes-no alternative).

•      In the section ‘Participants’ you specify the participants of the appointment and details of their notification.

•      Participants: Select the participants of the appointment (as you would select members of a workspace). You may enter email addresses of persons who are not registered users of your BSCW server; in the case of appointment scheduling, these persons can take part without registering as BSCW users. When you create an appointment scheduling in­side a shared workspace, the members of the work­space are preselected as parti­ci­pants by default.

•      Email language: Choose the language of the invitation email.

•      Note to include in automatic invitation email: Enter an optional note to be added to the otherwise auto­matically generated invitation email to be sent to all participants.

•      Hit [OK] to generate a preview of the voting form. If you are satisfied, hit [OK] again to finally create the appointment scheduling. If not, click [Edit appointment sched­uling] to change any details.

•      If you are a participant yourself, you will be asked next to vote on the dates suggested, which is explained below. As an organizer, you may also edit the participant list by clicking on [Edit participants].

Once the appointment scheduling has been created, all participants are invited via email to vote on the dates suggested. In the invitation email they receive a personalized link allowing them to access the appointment scheduling for voting even if they are not a member of the folder containing the appointment scheduling or not a registered user of the BSCW server altogether.

You as the organizer can change most details of the appointment scheduling, but not the dates and the voting scheme (‘yes-no’ or ‘yes-no-maybe’):

•      Select   Change    Properties  in the action menu of the appointment sched­uling and change name, description, voting period, notification details, or parti­cipants. Enter optional notes to be included in notification emails to participants.

•      Hit [OK] for the changes to become valid. All participants will be notified about the changes, new participants will be invited to vote and participants you have removed from the list will be informed.

If a participant suggests new participants and this has to be confirmed by you, you will re­ceive an email containing a link that takes you directly to the action form for inviting the new (and possibly other) participants.

•      The ‘Participants’ action form shows the present participants and allows to add new participants and to remove existing participants.

•      Add optional notes to be included to invitations of new participants and to emails to participants removed. Click [OK] when you are done.

You as the organizer may send an email message to the participants of an appointment sched­ul­ing.

•      Select   Send to    Participants  in the action menu of the appointment scheduling, enter your message and hit [OK]. You may send the message to all participants, all part­ic­ip­ants having already voted or not voted yet, or select certain participants to receive your message.

Note that not only the organizer, i.e. creator of an appointment scheduling, but also the man­ager of a workspace that contains the appointment scheduling can change an appointment sched­uling or send messages to the participants.

The voting periods of appointment schedulings may also be viewed arranged as a timeline.

•      Select  GoTo    Timeline  in the top menu of a folder to generate a timeline view of all appointment schedulings contained in the folder.

•      Further details are given in 8.1.10 Viewing tasks and projects as a timeline.