6.0.0-git
2024-11-14
Last Modified 2012-02-19 by Gunnar Wrobel

Add a new event

  1. Using either the sidebar or the top icon button, click Calendar
  2. There are two places where one can click to create a new event.
  3. First is the New Event button on the top of the browser window
  4. Second is the small + sign located on the desired event date
  5. Choose a title for the event
  6. Verify the Start and End dates are correct
  7. Click Save Event

Adding a reminder

Follow the instructions above, but select Alarm and set a time interval before saving your event. NOTE: You can set an alarm for an event after you adding it.

Schedule a meeting

  1. Follow the instructions above, but under the Attendees (optional) section click the Edit Attendees button.
    • Optionally, you can choose to send your attendees an email by checking the box labeled Send updates/invitations to all attendees when saving this event
  2. In the Add Attendees textbox you can enter usernames or email addresses, or you can click Address Book for a pop-up window to select contacts from your address book.
    • NOTE: These contacts must exist in your addressbook for the Expand Names feature to work
    • NOTE: To view other users' Free/Busy times, the contact must exist in your address book and the Free/Busy URL must exist
  3. When you are finished choosing your contacts, click Add Attendees. The window will close and you should see the contacts appear in the Edit Attendees window.
  4. When you are done adding attendees, click Save and Finish. The window should close and return you to the Add a new event window.
  5. Set other options such as reoccurring events and keywords if necessary.
  6. Click Save Event

Accepting an invitation to a meeting

You may receive an email requesting a meeting. If you are using IMP, you will see an Actions heading. In the dropdown menu you are able to do the following:

  • Accept and add to my calendar will email the sender that you have accepted the meeting and add the event to your calendar
  • Add to my calendar will add the event to your calendar
  • Accept Request will email the sender that you accepted the request
  • Tentatively Accept request will email the sender that you tentatively accepted the request
  • Deny request (I dont know. Please test and revise here)

If you do not use IMP, your email will contain three links:

  • Accept the event will email the sender that you accept
    • NOTE: This will not add the event to your calendar.
  • To accept the event tentatively will email the sender that you tentatively accept
  • Decline the event will email the sender that you decline

Viewing another users calendar

To view another users calendar, you must click the My Calendars button and the choose the users you wish to view under Shared Calendars. When done, click the Calendar button on to to view all calendars in one view.

Updating Events

To update an event, click the Pencil icon which appears next to the event.

  • NOTE: You may not be able to edit some events if you have read-only access to a shared calendar.

If the Pencil icon does not appear next to an event, click the Event title. This will bring to you a summary page. From there you can click an Edit link to update the event.

Deleting Events

To delete and event, click the red X icon which appears next to the event. If the red X icon does not appear next to an event, click the Event title. This will bring to you a summary page. From there you can click an Delete link to update the event.

Meeting planning

There are two disctinct concepts realized in Kronolith that allow events shared with groups or other individuals that should not be confused or even mixed.

Shared events

Kronolith allows to create arbitrary calendars per user. Calendar owners can set fine grained permissions for groups and individuals on their calendars. This allows to create calendars that can be seen and/or edited by larger groups of Kronolith users. Any events that are created in this calendar are visible to each user that has read permissions, if they choose so.
This kind of event sharing is most useful for events for a fixed set of (Kronolith) users that don't need to be arranged. With Kronolith 2.2 it is possible to mark single events in a shared calendar as private so that event details are only visible to the event creator.

Event planning

A more sophisticated way to plan and organize events, even with users that don't use Kronolith, is the meeting planning functionality that uses standardized iCalendar data objects exchanged via the iTip protocol. Users should not use this kind of event planning to create or add events to shared calendars, because this will confuse other users and could result in unpredictable behaviour.

This method of event planning consists of several components:

  • An designated event organizer
  • Known email addresses of all event attendees
  • Known free/busy URLs of all attendees, tied to the attendees email addresses in the organizer's address book (optional)
  • Email clients for the event attendees that support the iCalendar/iTip standards, e.g. IMP (optional)

This the workflow of an event planning:

  1. The organizer creates a new event
  2. In the event edit view, he clicks on the attendees button, which opens the event planning window
  3. He can add all attendees, either by looking them up in his address book (Turba), or by entering the email addresses directly
  4. If the attendees exist in his address book and have a free/busy URL assigned to them (either provided by Kronolith or by any other calendar server), Kronolith is looking up these URLs
  5. If free/busy information exists for the attendees, their free and busy times are displayed in the planning window, once for each attendee, an once merged for all attendees
  6. When the organizer is done, he closes the window and saves the event
  7. Kronolith sends multipart messages to all event attendees with the information about the planned event
  8. If the attendee uses an iCalendar/iTip capable mail client (IMP, Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, KMail etc.) he should see a form with the event details and buttons to accept or deny the event and to add it to his own calendar
  9. Other email clients will display a text email with event details and links for accepting or denying the event
  10. Attendees should add these events to their personal calendars and not to shared calendars, since several user that share this calendars could potentially have received the same invitation
  11. If the attendee clicked a link, the event in the organizer's calendar is updated immediately, changing his response status from "none" to "accepted" or "denied"
  12. If he uses a capable mail client instead, the organizer will recieve an iCalendar/iTip message back that he can use to update the event
  13. The organizer can always track the current response status of the event's attendees looking at the event in his calendar
  14. He can also change the event details or time, and the attendees will (optionally) get another iCalendar notification about the event changes that they can use to update the event in their calendars

This meeting planning method has the advantage to be based on standards and supported by many calendar and email clients and servers. Kronolith can be used by both, organizers and attendees, for this process, e.g. it also provides free/busy information for organizers the use Outlook or can read iCalendar invitations from Apple iCal. It integrates well with IMP and Turba to provide as much functionality as possible.

Missing features:

  • Easier workflow with Kronolith-only attendees
  • Changing of event times directly from the planning window
  • Automatic searching for first time slot free for all attendees

See also http://www.horde.org/kronolith/roadmap/ and http://www.horde.org/kronolith/docs/?f=TODO.html