Importing and synchronizing external appointments

The Groupware Connector is also able to identify appointment invitations of external or unknown contacts in the P.O. box of internal staff members, and import the matching Groupware appointments automati­cally into the CRM. The import can also be initiated manually via the Outlook add-in.

The Groupware Connector distinguishes between the follow­ing appointment organizers when importing external appointments:

1. An external contact, known in the CRM becomes the "Main participant".
2. A foreign contact, unknown in the CRM, becomes a pseudo record with an email address only in the attendee list. The main participant field remains empty.
3. An internal staff member maintained in the CRM, but who doesn't work actively with it (no login) becomes the "Main participant".

The third group of persons includes staff members of the own company who actually do not work with the CRM but should be able to organize appointments in the CRM using their Groupware. These staff members need to

1. be created in JustRelate CRM as internal staff members, and
2. receive an entry (account) in the Contacts/Groupware user administrator list.

The responsible can be assigned as follows:

• For the appointment of a known external contact, the account manager is always the person responsible if they have received an invitation.
• If the account manager was not invited, or the appointment was made by an unknown external person or an internal staff member with an inactive Groupware account, always the first internal staff member is entered as the responsible. The “first” is the one in whose mailbox the Groupware Connector first encounters the appointment.

On the appointment’s Additional data tab, the field Synchronized by now contains the (real) internal staff member from whose mailbox the appointment was synchronized.

An external appointment is specifically marked in JustRelate CRM, and has following properties:  

• The "Externally" flag is set (right next to the appointment Priority), and the appointment record ist colored in blue, also in the Entry Portal.
• The appointment is under the control of the external contact.
• Modification is not allowed: Crucial attributes such as the time, location... are under control of the Groupware.
• Modification is allowed: The description, reminder, and assignments, e.g., the project, attendees, resources, attachments, including the synchronization of the changes to the own Groupware P.O. Box. This way, for example, a field representa­tive receives additional information, like flight data that a colleague has entered in the CRM appointment. Such data is not distributed to other attendees via the Groupware.

An external appointment is under the control of the organizer, i.e., the external contact who created it. The organizer may update the appointment at any time in order to, for example, add an agenda or update other pieces of information. As long as the appointment has not been closed or set to "do not synchronize" (Additinal data tab), one must always be prepared that an update has been or will be imported from outside.

JustRelate CRM is able to control or prevent this.

• In external appointments (imported appointments with the "External" flag set), after saving changes to fields that are under synchronization, the synchronization status is set to "Do not synchronize", and the user is informed via a popup: "The synchronization status of the external appointment has been set to "Do not synchronize" for your changes to the CRM appointment to not be overwritten. The synchronization is stopped in both directions.
• The note field is treated immediately when editing. This means that the user always has the option to cancel if they do not want to turn off synchronization.

After modifying the attendee list of an external appointment (add, remove), a message is issued saying that the affected attendees will not be informed automatically, but that this can be done manually in the CRM,

• by email for external attendees (Confirmation to external), or
• by informing internal attendees (Distribute).

Drag & drop of ICS files is supported.

If an ICS file is dropped into the main window of the CRM web client, or onto the correspondence list of the CRM mailbox, the appointment import dialog opens, like it does when importing an appointment from the groupware on the client side. This makes it very easy to import, for example, appointment invitations via email with an ICS file attached as an appointment into the CRM.

ICS files cannot be dropped into the CRM calendars.