Managing Calendar Appointments

To view the details of an appointment, select it from any calendar view. (I.e., Month/Week/Day view, etc.) The appointment details will load in a popup window.

Editing Appointment Details

Select the appointment you want to edit. To change the calendar that the appointment is assigned to, simply change the appointment's Source, which is found on the Options card. Make any other appropriate changes and be sure to Save your edits.

When you edit an appointment, it updates on your calendar and, if the edits are "significant", any attendees will receive a new invitation notifying them of the change. However, in some cases, only certain attendees will be notified. For example, if you add someone to an existing appointment, only the person added will receive an invitation. When removing someone, only that person receives the cancellation. "Significant" changes are basically any change to an event other than things like changing reminders/alarms, changing availability, etc.

Deleting an Appointment

On occasion, you may need to delete a calendar appointment. To delete and remove an appointment from your calendar, select the appointment from any calendar view. The appointment details will load in a popup window, and from here the appointment can be deleted. You can also right-click on an appointment and delete it from the context menu.

Once deleted, the appointment will no longer appear on your calendar and any attendees will receive a notification that the appointment has been cancelled.

Deleting an Instance

When creating an appointment, it's possible to create it as a recurring event. That means the appointment will occur at a specific interval for a specific amount of time. The most common types of recurring appointments are weekly or monthly meetings. However, there may be a time when a recurring meeting needs to be cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. That's where deleting an "instance" of a meeting comes in handy.

Deleting an instance of a recurring event allows you to delete a single meeting from a recurring sequence. That meeting can then be formally cancelled or re-scheduled for a later day and time. Deleting an instance of a meeting will not affect any future or past instances - only the instance you delete.

Duplicating an Instance

The ability to create a recurring appointment is crucial for any user. However, recurring appointments generally follow a set of rules: Every Wednesday, or every third Monday, or the last Friday of each month. What if your recurring appointments are non-standard days? That's where duplicating appointments comes in.

Let's say you have a monthly sales meeting that happens on the last Friday of each month. The Wednesday prior to that meeting, though, you want to make sure you have all of your sales metrics in place and ready to present to the CEO and any other attendees. The problem here is that you can't create a standard recurring appointment as there aren't any dynamic rules available for those. You can't use the "last Wednesday" as your rule as there could be another Wednesday AFTER the last Friday throughout the year. Sure, you could go through each month and manually create an event, but that means re-typing a bunch of info. Thankfully, you can duplicate events and make sure they occur the exact day you want, without having to manually recreate each appointment.

Basically, in order to duplicate an appointment, you first want to open the appointment you want to duplicate. Then, you can make whatever changes to the appointment you want and then select Save as new item from the Actions (⋮) dropdown. This creates a NEW appointment based on the one you're duplicating, and only the info you change would be different.

Tentative Appointments

SmarterMail utilizes tentative meeting requests to help prevent meeting requests or event invitations from getting lost or overlooked. When a meeting invitation is sent, a tentative appointment will be automatically added to the calendar. The appointment can then either be accepted or declined from the email request or directly within the calendar interface. In addition, if a meeting or event is tentative, the reminder will still be sent if one was added to the invite!

To manage a tentative meeting request from the calendar, select the appointment to load its details in a popup window. After viewing the appointment details, you can choose to Accept or Decline the meeting. Tentative meeting requests are denoted with a dashed line around the appointment window at the day/time the event is scheduled.

It should be noted that if you delete a meeting invitation BEFORE you either accept or reject it, the tentative meeting will be removed from your calendar.

Forwarding Appointments

Generally, every effort is made by an organizer to make sure they invite anyone necessary when creating an appointment. However, there are times when others need to be included. For example, a small group of friends plan a dinner party, so the organizer sends out an invite. However, one attendee decides they want to bring a date. Rather than having the organizer edit the original appointment, which would update ALL attendees, the one attendee simply forwards their invite to their unexpected date so it can be added to the date's calendar.

This is a pretty basic example, but forwarding invitations saves time without inconveniencing the event organizer or other invitees with multiple updates and meeting changes. When the new invitee accepts the invitation, they're added to the meeting and the organizer receives a notice that their original invitation was forwarded and was, hopefully, accepted, and a new person added to the event.

Attachments

Occasionally, when viewing an appointment's details, an file of some sort is attached. Generally, attachments are added to appointments when the appointment is initially created in an email client such as Microsoft Outlook. However, attachments can be added via the SmarterMail webmail interface as well. Attachments can be downloaded to a local machine, or device, as needed. Attachments for appointments are handled just as attachments are handled in other areas of SmarterMail: the file's name and file extension are displayed and, if possible, a thumbnail of the attachment is displayed. (This most commonly occurs with image files.)