Creating and managing appointments

The Check availability function of an appointment opens the team calendar in a separate window and dis­plays the calendars of the appointment attendees. The appointment auto­matically has the focus in the calendar and can be modified after a double click or via the context menu.

1. Select Appointment from the function bar to open the the input form for appointments.
2. Enter a speaking Subject.
3. The Responsibility is automatically placed on the logged-in user. Change this if you want to delegate the appointment.
4. Click Save and open, and edit the appointment further.
5. Determine the specific timeframes and locations (beginning, end, place).
6. A suggestion list with the addresses of all participants entered in the participant list is displayed as the Location. Duplicates are removed. Contacts from the subform "Save as" are not considered.
7. Specify whether it is a all-day appointment (All-day).
8. Specify the Type of the appointment.
9. Check in accordance with the source object whether a case should be assigned to the appointment (if an open case exists for an attendee, it is automatically suggested when the appointment is saved).
10. Specify a Main participant who is displayed as a representative for the attendee list in activity overview lists.
11. If necessary, switch to the team calendar to check the availability of internal attendees, and to iden­tify scheduling conflicts. See also Team calendar.
12. For internal attendees, the Groupware flag for notifications with updates and synchronization of the appointment is automatically set.
13. Specify a personal Role for all attendees. It could be an active role (Visited, Necessary attendee... Initiator...) or not (Informational only, Save as). If an appointment is syn­chronized to the Groupware, only those internal contacts are entered as recipients of the appoint­ment that have a role in this appointment. Contacts without roles are not attendees and therefore no recipients.

You can assign persons and also their related main company as appointment attendees without any restriction. The attendees can be persons as well as any external companies, regardless of whether a participating company is already represented by one of its employees as an attendee of the appoint­ment.

In this process, the main company of the external main participant person can be correctly assigned as another attendee as well, no matter if the assignments are made in insert or update mode, in a non-modal or modal appointment dialog, or if the assigned attendees have a role.

14. Check whether Attachments and Resources need to be planned. You can assign attachments using drag and drop, or in the same way as contacts.
15. Enter comments in the Note field, or simply click the Time stamp button to save the signature used when adding comments.
16. The status of a new appointment is Open. Check whether the status has to be changed, e.g., to Firmly agreed. Update the Status info field in the status dialog, if necessary, to record reasons for and additions to the status change.
17. Specify whether you would like to be reminded of it before the beginning of the appointment (Remind me in).
18. If necessary, specify to which internal staff members the appointment should be distributed addi­tionally. Include these contacts in the distribution list. They don’t necessarily have to be attend­ees of the appointment. Only internal contacts can be selected. See also: Notification of appointment attendees
19. If you are included in the distribution list on an appointment, you can mark it as Read and comment this appointment (Comment field).
20. Click OK or save the record.

The Groupware-Connector will automatically pass the appointment to the Groupware. Thus, the internal attendees who do not work in the CRM can be automatically informed about the appointment and be invited by email.

For an appointment that has taken place, a visit report should be created. Even if you have not yet added any contacts to the distribution list, you can then use the Visit Report Wizard to comfortably dis­tribute the appointment or visit report to all or selected contacts.