How meetings and invitations work

Calendar is the shared diary of the company. This page explains what happens behind its screens.

A meeting and its attendees

A meeting holds a subject, a start and an end (or whole days), a place, a video link, tags, reminders, a description for the guests and notes for the team. Each person invited is an attendee of the meeting, with their own answer: Yes, No, Maybe, or Needs Action until they answer. The person who creates the meeting is its organizer and first attendee, and counts as Yes.

Reminders are shared definitions, such as Notification - 15 Minutes or Email - 3 Hours: a meeting picks the ones it needs.

Who sees what

Every internal user can see every meeting of the company. What they see depends on two settings of the meeting, under Status:

• Busy or Available. A busy meeting blocks the time: when the same person is invited to another meeting at that time, a moon marks them as unavailable. An available meeting blocks nothing.
• The privacy. Public and Only internal users show the details to colleagues. Private hides them from everybody who does not attend: the subject reads Busy, and the place, the attendees and the description stay hidden. Left empty, it shows User default and follows the organizer's own choice, the Privacy of the Calendar tab of their preferences: Public by default, Private by default or Internal users only. Set your preferences shows where the preferences open.

A portal user, such as a client, sees only the meetings they attend.

Who may change a meeting

The organizer and the attendees can change a meeting, and an administrator can change any meeting that is not private. Everybody else only sees it; a private meeting of someone else cannot be changed or deleted at all.

Invitations and answers

Saving a meeting that has not started yet sends an invitation to every attendee with an e-mail address, except the person who saves. The e-mail carries an invitation.ics file, which any calendar program can open, the video link when there is one, and a View button to a page where the guest accepts or declines. An attendee added later receives an invitation then.

Each answer is stored on the attendee; accepting and declining also add a line to the chatter of the meeting. Moving a future meeting sends the attendees the new time, and cancelling it with Send and delete sends them the cancellation. Calendar automations lists every e-mail and when it goes out.

A series and its occurrences

A repeating meeting is a rule (every week on Tuesday, six times) and the meetings it creates. Each occurrence is a full meeting with its own answers, so an attendee can accept one and decline the next. A change asks for its scope: This event, This and following events or All events; Repeat a meeting shows each case.

Meetings linked to a record

A meeting created from a record keeps a link to it: a button at the top of the form opens the record, and Linked to names it. Two cases matter here:

• An activity of type Meeting, scheduled on a record, has a Schedule button that opens the calendar to book the meeting. Activities belong to Activities.
• A hearing of a case creates the meeting of the hearing's lawyers: see Schedule and record a hearing.

The form of a contact has a Meetings button that opens the meetings that contact attends.

The views

Calendar opens on the Week, one column a day. The Kanban view shows the same meetings as cards, the furthest first, and the List view shows them as lines. On a phone, Calendar opens on the cards; the calendar stays available in the view button.

The views do not filter alike. The calendar and the list show the meetings of the people ticked under Attendees; the cards show every meeting you may see. On the cards, the start and the end are printed one against the other, and an all-day meeting also shows a time next to its All day badge.

Where the settings are

Calendar has no settings page of its own. Calendar/Configuration/Settings holds two options, Outlook Calendar and Google Calendar, which let users keep their calendar in step with one of those services; ticking one installs a module and needs an account with that provider. Emails, integrations and tools settings describes them. The list of reminders is in Calendar/Configuration/Reminders, shown in developer mode: see Developer mode and technical menus.

What Calendar does not do

• It does not book rooms: Location is free text, and two meetings can name the same room at the same time without a warning.
• It does not offer booking pages where clients choose a time themselves.
• It does not synchronise with outside calendars unless one of the two options above is set up.
• An activity is not a meeting: a to-do with a deadline lives in Activities, even when its type is Meeting.