To create a new appointment, you have to fill out some required fields that are obligatory for each appointment. Only if these required fields are filled out, an appointment can be created.
The required fields for creating a new appointment are the following:
Description |
Appointment Start |
Appointment End |
Appointment start and end are automatically filled in, depending on how you want to create an appointment. Typical ways are clicking on an appointment in the Day View, Week View or Month View. Only if the description field is filled out you can change to other tabs where you can provide more details for your appointment.
In the appointment tab you can create an appointment and via two radio buttons you can specify whether this should be a personal or a group appointment. There are different ways for creating appointments quickly and easily.
When you create an appointment, personal appointment is selected by default. You just need to enter your appointment data and click on the Save button. Of course you can check the availability of resources, e.g. a car and also book it for your appointment. Finally, the appointment is saved to your personal calendar.
When you create a group appointment in which you would like to take part yourself, click on Group appointment and you will automatically be taken to the list of participants. Continue with selecting the remaining participants. As a participant, you can select all available users, resources and user groups. Additionally, you have the possibility of selecting entire contributor lists. In this case, all Open-Xchange 5 server users that are contained in this contributor list will be added as participants in the appointment.
All participants receive the appointment via e-mail. Via the web front end, the participants can accept or refuse appointments by hand. If the notification email is opened by a participant via the Open-Xchange server, a popup window appears where the appointment can be accepted or refused directly. Of course it is also possible to create appointments in which you do not participate yourself. Simply delete yourself from the list of participants. Besides the text, every e-mail appointment message contains an attachment in the form of an ICAL-file. You can use this ICAL-file with the help of an external ICAL capable appointment planner, for example, the Thunderbird™ program. Optionally, you have the possibility of using the link contained in the e-mail. Via this link, you can directly reach the corresponding appointment entry in the web interface of the Open-Xchange groupware server.
When you create an appointment, the folder field is preset to the calendar you are currently working in. When you edit the appointment at a later time, this drop-down list can be used to move the appointment to another folder. Here you can select between your personal appointment book, public appointment books and released appointment books, depending on your permission for the respective folders. Please note that the read, write and delete permission of the selected folder are copied to the new appointment.
Example: Moving a planned vacation from your private calendar to a public vacation calendar which is visible for all staff members.
Enter a short description of this appointment in this field. "Description" is a required field. If you cannot fill in this field, the appointment cannot be created or changed.
Enter here the appointment data. You can either enter the date directly or click on the calendar icon
to select a date from an integrated calendar. In order to select an appointment from the calendar, you simply click on the desired day. Then the calendar is closed and the selected day is automatically entered in the field. Within the calendar you switch between the displayed months. With the pull-down menu you can select a time for your appointment. If your appointment is an all-day appointment, select the relevant checkbox. For all-day appointments the time fields are ignored. The all-day appointment is created for all days, beginning with the start date and ending with end date. Upon saving, the entered appointments are automatically checked for overlaps with other appointments and resources are checked for conflicts. No conflict handling is performed for all-day appointments.
Here you specify which type of appointment should be displayed. Select the type of appointment from the pull-down menu. The type of the appointment determines which color it is displayed as in the Day View. Possible settings are reserved, temporary, absent on business, and free.
You can sort appointments into different categories to maintain a better overview. The available categories can be selected via a popup window. By default, you can choose from the following categories:
Remarks | In the remarks field you can add additional information. |
Reminder | You can specify here whether and when you would like to get an email reminder for an appointment. Every participant of an appointment can individually specify the desired reminder for this appointment. For this, the user has to go to the detail view of the appointment, select the desired time frame and click the Save button. |
Notify participants | If you select this checkbox all participants of this appointment are informed via email of its creation and/or updates to it. If you change important appointment data, you should activate this notification. |
If the appointment is a group appointment, you can add further participants and participant groups to the appointment. Assigning participants to an appointment works similar to assigning object permission as already discussed in defining object-specific rights. It is generally the case that all participants of an appointment have read and write access. Public and released folders are exceptions. All system users of the groupware have access to public calendar folders. For released folders, the object rights depend on the rights set for the folder. You find further details in the chapter "Folder Concepts".
A manual configuration of the read and write permission is not necessary during the creation of an appointment. A new appointment has the same permission as the folder in which it is saved. You find a detailed discussion of this topic in chapter "Folder Concepts".
Besides participants you also can assign resources to an appointment if it is a group appointment. The assignments work similar to those in the participants tab already described in the section Object-Specific Rights. Similar to the previous assignment of participants you access resource groups or individual resources here. For this you select system resources from the list box data source and select the desired resources. This works similar to choosing individual participants or participant groups.
If you set up a recurrent appointment, you can enter the relevant setting under appointment sequence.
Here you have several options for specifying the repetition period for the appointment:
If the repetition period has this setting, an individual appointment is created without repetition. This is the default setting for appointments.
If you select this as the repetition period, the appointment is repeated periodically after the given days. If the appointment sequence is going to be edited later, please note that this option cannot be changed any more. Changing to weekly or monthly is not possible.
With a weekly repetition period, you can add appointments that should recur in weekly intervals. For example, if you have set the repetition period to be 3 weeks, the appointment is added to the calendar every 21 days. You can also specify on which weekdays the appointment should be repeated. For this you simply click the appropriate flag for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, depending on which weekday the appointment should be repeated on. If the appointment sequence is going to be edited later, please note that this option cannot be changed any more. Changing to daily or monthly is not possible.
If this appointment occurs periodically on a specific day in intervals of a certain number of months, you select this option. In the left text field you enter the day of the month on which the appointment takes place and in the right one how many months should pass between an appointment and the next in the sequence. If the appointment sequence is going to be edited later, please note that this option cannot be changed any more. Changing to daily or weekly is not possible.
Yearly recurring appointments can also be set up via the sequence configuration. For this simply set the date of the recurring appointment under yearly.
If you have decided on a repetition period, you can specify here up to which date the appointments should be repeated. You can enter the date directly (in day..month..year format) or click on the icon
to select the date via a mouse click on the integrated calendar. Upon saving, the entered sequence appointments are not automatically checked for overlaps with other appointments. Thus, appointments that are entered later could very well lead to conflicts with existing sequence appointments.
Via this tab you can check whether all participants or resources are available for the appointment. The check is done for a time span of a day.
You can set the time span to be examined via the input field and pull-down menus. You can enter the date to be examined directly or via the integrated calendar. Furthermore, you can select whether the availability check should be carried out for either participants or resources only, or whether both should be included in the analysis. Once you have made your choice, you can run the availability check via check.
Once the analysis is finished, you receive a tabular report with which you can determine whether the necessary persons and resources are available for your appointment.
The report is sorted by hour and participant and contains color marking for easy interpretation. The times within the examined time span at which one of the participants has an appointment are marked with red cells. The times within the examined time span at which none of the participants have any appointments are marked with green cells. The times outside the examined time span at which one of the participants is unavailable are marked with gray cells. The times outside the examined time span at which none of the participants have any appointments are marked with white cells. You can exclude a participant from this appointment by activating the checkbox in the same row and then clicking the "Apply" button. The buttons on the right underneath the table allow you to repeat the check for the previous day or the next day.
In order to check a longer time span for the availability of persons and resources, you can perform a query. The system automatically searches for possible dates and graphically displays reasonable suggestions for possible dates.
For a query you can specify a start and an end date or selected these via the calendar icon
. The check is performed for the specified time span. In order to set the time span for the check, you can set the start and end dates via the dropdown menus. The duration specifies how long the appointment should last. Available times within the time span are displayed as green blocks. Times within this span that would lead to conflicts are marked with red blocks. Times within the selected date frame but outside the selected time span are included in the check and the result is displayed as well. In the display these times are represented by white and gray blocks, where the white block correspond to the meaning of green blocks within the selected window and the gray blocks correspond to the red blocks. You can carry out such queries for date spans up to 31 days. If you click on the desired start time, the necessary appointment data are automatically transferred and filled into the suitable fields in the appointment tab.
When you create an appointment, an automatic conflict check is performed in which the data of the new appointment are checked for overlaps with other appointments and resources. Only when you create appointment sequences, conflict checking is skipped for reasons of clarity and simplicity. However, when you later create further appointments these can absolutely conflict with individual appointments within the appointment sequence. In addition, there is no conflict checking for all-day appointments. Whether or not a new appointment overlaps with another appointment is checked after you press the Save button. Apparent conflicts are displayed in a list. There you also find a listing of potential conflicts with respect to resources, in case a resource for a certain appointment is already being used. You can generally indicate at this point whether an appointment conflict should be ignored. Resource conflicts, on the other hand, cannot be ignored. In order to ignore existing conflicts and to still create the appointment, simply click the button ignore conflicts and save. If you would like to remove an appointment conflict, you perform an appointment query via the conflict page, where you click the button Send request. Alternatively, you can use the Back button to return to the appointment creation form. If you would rather like to quit entering the appointment at this time, you can simply click the Cancel button. All changes made by you would then be lost.