Creating an appointment

You may enter appointments into a BSCW calendar to organize events of different types (pri­vate dates, group meetings, computer 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. Appointments may also be used to organize synchronous cooperation: BSCW helps to start a computer con­ference between the participants of an appointment. Besides name, date and eventual partici­pants, you may provide additional information about the appointment like a category, a de­scription or a location.

•      Inside a calendar, select  File    New    Appointment  in the top menu, click new appointment in the ac­tion shortcuts or click new appointment in the day entries of a week or month view to create a new ap­pointment.

•      By clicking the tabs in the ‘Add Appointment’ form you may add different kinds of in­formation to an appointment.

•      Appointment: Besides name and date (and possibly time and duration) you may op­tionally specify:

o  Description: provides additional information.

o  Category: selects a category for the appointment. Appointments of different cate­gories may be displayed in different colours (see 7.1.7 Calendar options).

o  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 of the appointment may be chosen from your address book. You may also specify whole member groups of one or more of your workspaces as participants of an appointment. If you do not want to invite all members of a workspace group, select the group and click on [resolve selected groups]: the individual group members will be indicated in the ‘Participants’ field, and you may de-select some of them. You may also enter the email addresses of persons you would like to invite to the appointment. 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 enter the physical location of the appointment (if applicable). If the appointment is about a virtual meeting, specify the online tool that is to be used (also see 7.1.4 Participating in a virtual meeting).

Note: Supplementary audio or video hardware may be required to use these tools. Inter­operability may be limited to specific hardware platforms.

•      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] in one of the tabbed forms 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.