Appointment Creation Details

Preface

This document describes what happens after a Schedule Visitor successfully creates an appointment.

What Happened?

In the appointment creation workflow, your actions told the Scheduling Assistant who you wanted to meet with and at what time. The Scheduling Assistant previously collected Preferences from the person you are meeting with when they registered as a Schedule Owner. These preferences include the Location of the meeting and the format for the meeting's title.

The Scheduling Assistant uses all of this to create an event in the Schedule Owner's calendar. The Schedule Owner is the ORGANIZER. The Schedule Visitor (you) is added as an ATTENDEE of the event, and it tells the Calendar Server that you have "accepted the invitation."

The Scheduling Assistant then automatically sends an email message including the event details to both parties to notify that the event was created.

If the Schedule Owner set the Scheduling Assistant preference to send an email reminder, a record is set up to send that message to the Schedule Visitor with the details of the event at the desired time.

If you log into the calendar service as the Schedule Owner, you'll see that you own the event and can manipulate any of these details after the fact.

If you log into the calendar service as the Schedule Owner, you'll see the event in your agenda, and you'll only be able to change your participation status. The Scheduling Assistant offers you the ability to cancel appointments you created through this workflow.

For Deployers

How the Scheduling Assistant constructs the events that are stored in the Calendar Server is defined by the IEventUtils interface. The default implementations perform all of the above, but can be easily extended to further modify the event.

For example, the University of Wisconsin extends the IEventUtils interface such that if the appointment being created involves a certified Academic Advisor and a student, one of the student's identifying attributes in our student administration system is appended to the end of the event description. This was specifically requested by Academic Advisors on our campus; having this information in the appointment helps the advisor prepare in advance for the meeting by being able to look up the student's detailed records.

It is also possible to implement an EventListener that can perform additional actions asynchronously after an event is successfully created. The immediate email notification and reminder setup mechanisms described above are implemented in this fashion.