Group SchedulingTable of Contents
The group schedule functionality of KOrganizer allows you to organize appointments, meetings and shared to-do items, request responses from attendees and publish items. If you are being invited to an event or to-do, you can reply to it, stating if you will be able to attend, or send a counter proposal, with different arrangements, like a different time or location. You can also publish your free/busy schedule, to let people know when you are available, and request the same information from others.
Currently, KOrganizer schedules events and to-dos using email to transport the data, in a standards based scheme, the IMIP-protocol for group scheduling. Being a standard, IMIP is a used by many other clients too. For example Microsoft®Outlook, Lotus Notes and Novell Evolution. This means that you can share events with other users using one of these clients. KOrganizer is integrated with KMail for receiving, processing, and sending events, event responses, updates, cancellations, etc. For instance, when you get an invitation in KMail, and decide to accept it, by clicking the accept link in the mail body, the event is added to your calendar, and a response to the event's organizer is sent automatically.
If you check the Use Groupware Communication box in the KOrganizer group scheduling configuration, KOrganizer will handle the group scheduling communication for you. In other words, you will seldom need to use the menu directly to perform the scheduling actions. For instance, if you create an event or to-do with attendees, KOrganizer will ask you if you want to send the invitations to the attendees, so you will not need to use the → menu item later. Also, if you change your status as an attendee for an event you were invited to, it will ask you if you want to send your updated status to the event's organizer, so you will not need to use the → menu item later.
If you simply want to send an event, to-do or journal entry, choose the → menu item, when the item is selected. Then a dialog appears, asking you the email addresses which will receive the event or to-do. The item will be sent by email, in the iCalendar format.
Please note that you can use this action to email any item to anyone, not just to the item's attendees. In fact, you can publish an item with no attendees at all, as publishing does not request an answer from the attendees.
An example: you are playing in a band and, from time to time, you give live concerts. To notify your fans about the concerts, you maintain a mailing list. If you use KOrganizer to organize your concert dates, you can just choose the → menu item, put in the address of the mailing list and the event gets sent. Mailing list subscribers who use KOrganizer get the concert date automatically inserted in their calendar.
Publishing an event as described above will only inform the receiver about the event, but not give her the option to ask for attendance. Use → if you want to provide that option instead.