Create an appointment

You may enter appointments in a BSCW calendar to organize timed events of different kinds (private appointments, group meetings, telephone conferences). An appointment includes at least a date and a designation (name). If it is a group appointment, a list of participants can be specified, who will be automatically invited as desired and whose individual status (accepted, canceled) will be managed together with the status of the entire appointment. Besides the name, date and possible participants, you can also specify repeats of the appointment and sending reminders.

• To create an appointment, select

from the top menu in a calendar or click on Hinzufügen

in a day entry of a week or month view.

• The 'New appointment' action form has four sections where you can enter the details of the new appointment:

• 'Appointment': Enter name and optionally tags and description of the new appointment. Furthermore you can specify:

• Category, priority: Select a category and the priority of the appointment. You can display appointments of different category in different colors (see 10.1.6).

• Date/Time: Specify the date and time of the appointment. Optionally, you can specify the end of the appointment and a time zone.

• Status: defines the status of an appointment (undetermined, confirmed, canceled). If an appointment will take place in any case, regardless of the participants' confirmations or cancellations, select 'confirmed' here, for example. The default status 'automatic' means that the status is initially displayed as 'undetermined' and then changes automatically when all participants have accepted or cancelled.

• 'Participants': You select the participants for the appointment just as you would invite new members to a workspace: You can use your address book, enter usernames directly, or do a user search first. Tick whether the participants should be invited to the meeting by email. For group calendars, you can also invite people to an appointment who are not members of the workspace to which the group calendar belongs. If you want to participate in the appointment, do not forget to invite yourself: You are not automatically a participant of an appointment you create!

• 'Repetition': Here you can add a series of repetitions to your appointment. You determine these with rules of different types (e.g. weekly, weekly on certain weekdays or monthly on a certain day), which you select in the 'Rule type' list box. By clicking on [Add recurrence] a recurrence rule appears, which you can design according to your wishes. You can add more rules in the same way, which will create more recurrences of your appointment. Short notations are used for monthly recurrences: thus 2 means the penultimate day of the month and 1 Sa means the last Saturday of the month.

Exceptions, i.e. days on which a repetition of the appointment should not take place, are entered by selecting a rule type, clicking on [Add exception] and specifying the generated exception field more precisely according to your wishes. Of course, you can also define multiple exceptions this way.

Note: Selecting a rule type alone, e.g. 'Weekly', does not add a recurrence to your appointment; you must click the [Add Recurrence] button to do so.

• 'Reminders': Here you can specify how you yourself, the participants of the appointment, the members of your workspace or individuals should be reminded of the appointment by email. Select the group of people to whom the reminder message is to be sent in the 'Reminder type' list box. By clicking on [Add] a form field appears where you specify the details of the reminder message (when, how often, to whom). You can add a personal message to the automatically generated reminder message. By clicking [Add] repeatedly, you can have multiple reminders sent to different groups of people at different times.

• Confirm with [OK] to create the appointment according to the specifications you have made so far. You can also set all the specifications for the appointment at a later time or change them again.