# How meetings and invitations work

What a meeting holds, who sees and changes it, how invitations and answers travel, how a series and its occurrences relate, where the settings live, and what Calendar does not do.

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

## A meeting and its attendees {#model}

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 {#privacy}

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](/docs/essentials/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 {#who-can-edit}

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 {#invitations}

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](calendar-automations) lists every e-mail and when it goes out.

## A series and its occurrences {#recurrence}

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](repeat-a-meeting) shows each case.

## Meetings linked to a record {#linked}

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](/docs/activities).
- A hearing of a case creates the meeting of the hearing's lawyers: see [Schedule and record a hearing](/docs/law-cases/schedule-and-record-a-hearing).

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

## The views {#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 {#settings}

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](/docs/general-settings/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](/docs/general-settings/developer-mode-and-technical-menus).

## What Calendar does not do {#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](/docs/activities), even when its type is Meeting.

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- Source: https://jaah.app/docs/calendar/how-meetings-and-invitations-work
- Updated: 2026-10-27
- Version: Calendar 19.0.1.0.3