Notification of appointment attendees

To ensure that internal information about an appointment is not visible to external appointment partici­pants through synchronization, please observe the following notes and also the above-men­tioned section.

Appointments can be created and managed completely in Outlook. These appointments are then imported into the CRM. Usually, this is done automatically. This means:

• Everything from the appointment preparation in Outlook is transferred to the CRM,
• The groupware flags for notifying attendees are then automatically set in the CRM on the appointment for all attendees, i.e., also for external contacts who are in the attendee list.
• Consequently, all changes to an appointment in the CRM are also automatically synchronized back and are communicated to all attendees via Outlook, so they can be seen by all attendees.

In contrast:

• If an appointment is created in the CRM, then the groupware flags for notifying the attendees are auto­matically set only for the internal contacts but not for the external ones. This gives you control over the notifications at first.

If appointments in the CRM are synchronized with external contacts that have the groupware flag, then all information in the appointment preparation (notes) or assigned as an attachment is always synchronized as well. You cannot set the groupware flag for external contacts arbitrarily. Once set, the external contact concerned must be removed from the attendee list if you want to exclude them from the appointment synchronization.

Synchronize appointments with external attendees only after having carefully checked for internals in the notes field (appointment preparation). For appointment preparation, use the ways to store information for internal use in the CRM in an easy way via follow-up activities of the appointment (e.g. memo, task, etc.).

The Groupware Connector can identify appointment invitations from external or unknown contacts in the mailboxes of internal employees, and automatically import the associated Groupware appointments into the CRM. The import is also possible manually via the Outlook add-in.

Tip: If you receive an invitation in your CRM mailbox, please do not confuse it with a normal email. Just click Accept, and then the appointment should appear in your calendar. Otherwise, the appointment will be rejected, as you will know from your groupware.

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

Tip: Set the external appointment to "do not synchronize" when writing a protocol, etc., in the appoint­ment preparation. If the appointment is then completed, it will be excluded from synchronization from that point on.