Schedule meetings and events on the Calendar

Overview

The Calendar application helps you keep track of personal appointments, group meetings and company-wide events. Remote workers can track the availability of colleagues in the home office. Project teams can access the latest deadline dates. Sales departments can post meeting dates and share agendas. Whether you are in the office, on the road or working at home, you'll always have access to the latest scheduling information for yourself and your co-workers.

Generally speaking, there are two reasons you might want to add events to the Calendar:

To announce events happening at your company.
When you're posting things like upcoming deadlines, company-wide meetings or holidays, you are most likely just posting it on the Calendar as a reference. In these cases, you do not need to reference the Calendar to choose a date and time and you do not need to invite specific members; you are simply posting it on the Calendar to let other members know about it.
To schedule meetings with invitations, checking first for schedule conflicts.
The Calendar can also be used by people who typically have several meetings scheduled every day. Using the web office Calendar, you can see when everyone is free before setting up the meeting. At the same time you can check the availability of your meeting room.

Once you set up the meeting time and place and choose who should come, you can send out automatic meeting invitations or notifications. The invitations are delivered to each participant by email; it asks them to go to the web office to accept, reject, or tentatively accept. The organizer of the meeting receives an email each time someone responds and the RSVP's are also displayed in the web office Calendar.

If you would like to let participants know about a meeting but do not need them to respond, you can send them a notification instead.

Just before the meeting, all the people you invited receive a reminder, if you set one for the meeting. The reminder arrives in the form of an email message or, if they have the Desktop Assistant installed, as a popup alarm on their computer.

You can use the web office Calendar to schedule all of these events. You can also use it to schedule personal events that appear only on your Calendar.

If another member wants to schedule a meeting with you, they can first check to see if you already have something scheduled at that time. This means it's now more important than ever to keep your web office Calendar as up-to-date as possible. When you're planning to be out of the office for any reason, make sure this is reflected in your Calendar. Create an event for your vacation or personal days and change the "Show time as" indicator for the event to "Out of Office." If you say that the event is for "Me only," others cannot see any details about it but when they try to schedule a meeting with you during this time, they see that you are planning to be out of the office.

1. To create a new event, go to the New Event page.

To begin creating an event, do one of the following:

Select Calendar > New Event in the Menu. The New Event Page appears.
Or go to your Calendar and click New in the Command Bar of any Calendar view.

2. Fill in the event details.

Then fill in some basic details about the event.

Title	This is the name of the event that members see in the day, week, and month views. Note: If your event is a scheduled web or audio meeting, the meeting’s password (if one is required) cannot be the same as the event’s title.
This is for	Choose who is involved in this event—Me only, Everyone, or Selected members. The members you choose receive any invitations, notifications, or event reminders you set for this event. When you choose Me only, the event appears only on your Calendar. When you choose Everyone, the event appears on all members' Calendars. It also appears for guests, if you have enabled guest access to your web office. When you choose Selected Members, you can hand pick which members and groups see the event. Go to the Participants tab to choose members. Tip: You can change the default so that each time you add a new event, the "This is for" setting is pre-set for the types of events you schedule most often. Learn how to customize your personal Calendar settings.
Start and End time	Indicates when the event begins and ends.
All Day	If this is a holiday, a birthday, or some event that lasts all day, click the All Day check box. You do not need to enter a Start or End time when you select this option.
Show time as	Choose one of these options—Busy, Out of Office, Tentative, or Free—so when others schedule meetings with you, they can see if you're available at this time. For example, when you create an event for a personal day off, even though the event appears only on your Calendar, others see that you're Out of the Office when they try to schedule a meeting with you during this block of time.
Location	Choose a location from the drop-down list. If you do not see the location you need listed, type it in the Other box. To prevent double-booking of a location, check first to see if it is available at the time you need. You can click the "See if location is available" link on the Details tab, or go to the Participants tab to see when the location is free. For more information, see Scheduling locations. Administrators can customize the list of locations. To learn more, see Customize the location drop-down list.
Description	Type a description of the event.
Highlight Color	Events that you create can be assigned highlight colors. For example, you may choose to highlight an urgent meeting in orange, so that it stands out in your calendar view. If you are inviting other members or notifying them of the event, they will not see the highlight color that you pick. Unless a calendar is shared with another user, only the person creating the event can see the highlight color in their calendar. If you decide to highlight an event, but do not see the color applied to the event in the calendar view, the highlight event setting has been turned off. You can turn highlight colors on or off for your calendar in Calendar Settings. Tip: In addition to picking a color from the color picker, you can type the name of your color in the Highlight Color field if you know it already. You can also enter a custom color code in the format of a hexadecimal value (examples: #336699, or #EBD7FF). This is a standard, web-based color palette, where each color consists of six numbers or letters preceded by the pound (#) sign. To find more color codes, search the web for hexadecimal colors.
File	You can include a file with your event, such as a meeting agenda in a Microsoft Word® file or driving directions in an image file. Type the file name and path, or click Browse to select the file. If the file is a .gif or .jpg, check the Show image checkbox to automatically display the image with this event. For more information, see Tips on posting files with events.
Mark as private	If you want to keep the event details private, even to others you've given sharing access to your Calendar, choose the Mark as private checkbox. Read more about keeping an event private.

3. Schedule participants and select locations.

Go to the Participants tab to check participant and location availability and to select which members and groups you want to attend your meeting.

You see the following options:

Start and End time

If you need to make any adjustments to the Date or Time due to scheduling conflicts, you can change them here. You may need to do this if someone has a schedule conflict for the first time you selected.

Participants and Locations

Add the members, groups, and locations that you want to participate in the event.

To add members, groups and locations to the event's participant list, you use the participant picker. The picker is the drop-down list located at the bottom of list of participants. You can use the picker in many ways; just use the ones you are comfortable with:

You can use the picker as a simple list. Click on the arrow to see the list, then scroll to find the name you want. To add the name, just double-click on the name, or click on the name and then either click on Add or hit the Enter key.
You can also pick multiple entries at the same time. As you select each name, hold down the Ctrl key. This allows you to select multiple names. After you have selected the names you want, either click on Add or hit the Enter key.
You can even type into the picker. As you type, the picker will select the first name that matches what you have typed. Type in "e" and you will see the names that begin with "e". You can keep typing until you match the name you want ("eric"), or you can use the UP and DOWN arrows on the keyboard to select the correct name. With the name selected, hit the Enter key, click the Add button or even double-click on the name.
You can add groups as well as individual participants. Groups appear at the top of the list and are set off in square brackets, such as [Sales]. You pick groups exactly the same way as you pick individual members. When selecting by typing, you need to type the "[" first.
The participant picker also allows you to pick one or more locations. While locations do not really participate in the meeting, the picker can be thought of a meeting resource picker as well. Locations appear at the bottom of the list and are set off in braces, such as {2nd Floor Conference Room}. You pick locations exactly the same way as you pick individual members. When selecting by typing, you need to type the "{" first.

Adding participants who are not site members. If there are attendees you would like to add who are not members of your site, you can enter their email addresses in the box provided for participants outside of your site. You can also choose a contact from your contact list.

Clicking the Add button adds these participants to the attendee list, where they appear with a non-member icon.

To remove a member, group or location from the Participant list, click the delete icon beside their name.

To check for scheduling conflicts, click the Check availability checkbox. A grid detailing when each member and location is available appears.

If you added a group, click the expand icon [+] beside the group name to see when individual members are free.

If there are too many scheduling conflicts, you can choose a new time by clicking into another time in the grid. To change the date, select another date from the Start Time field above.

To change a member's attendance from Required to Optional, click the Required link beside their name.

Tip: You can use a group as a quick way to enter multiple names, even if the people you want to invite are less than the full group. For instance, if you wish to meet with 5 members of the 7 person marketing team, start by adding the [Marketing] group. Then delete the members you don't want to invite by clicking the delete icon.

Tip: You can schedule a meeting in more than one location, by using the participant picker to add multiple locations. This can be useful when scheduling a teleconference at multiple offices.

For more information about all the options that are available here, see Choosing participants and checking their availability.

Location

This is where you can check to see whether a location is available before you schedule it. Locations appear at the bottom of the list of participants and locations. Choose the location you want from the drop-down list.

For more information, see Scheduling locations.

4. Indicate event recurrence.

A recurring event is one that happens at some regular interval, such as a meeting that happens every Friday or a birthday that happens every year. If this is a "recurring" event, go to the Recurrence tab when creating a new event and indicate how frequently the event takes place.

You only have to schedule a recurring event once and the event appears on your Calendar at the interval you set. Any reminders you set for the recurring event arrive on each instance of the event as well. If you need to make changes to a recurring event, you have the option of editing just a single occurrence or all events in the series.

Note: If you are scheduling a WebEx Meeting that will require participant registration, the event cannot be recurring.

5. Set event reminders.

Go to the Reminders tab to set up an automatic reminder.

You can choose who receives the reminder and whether you want them to receive it a few minutes, hours, days or weeks before the event.

Reminders arrive via email and via the Desktop Assistant, if users have installed this software.

For more information, see Invitations, notifications, and reminders and Desktop Assistant.

6. Use web and audio conferencing with your meeting

If your site has subscribed to web or audio conferencing, the WebEx Meeting tab will be visible.

To enable web or audio conferencing for your meeting, mark the WebEx Meeting checkbox on the WebEx Meetings tab, then configure the basic settings. To learn more about these options, see WebEx Meetings.

Events that have been created with web or audio components enabled will contain the WebEx Meeting box on the Calendar Details tab. Members can use this box to

obtain information about the meeting, such as the toll-free number
start or join a meeting by clicking the link at the bottom

7. Save the event and send invitations or notifications.

Now that you've added all the information about the event, inform all the people you've invited about the event. Do one of the following:

Click Save. You are prompted to send an invitation, a notification, or nothing.
Click Send Invitation. This saves the event and sends an invitation to all event participants.