# &korganizer; workshop: Group scheduling

## Overview

Since version 3.0, &korganizer; supports group scheduling. This means you can use it to organize appointments and meetings as a team. Group scheduling is based on a peer-to-peer architecture using email as the communication medium.

For example, if you want to organize a meeting, you create the event in &korganizer; and add all people that should attend by selecting them from the &kde; addressbook. You can do this by selecting from a &korganizer; dialog or by dragging an entry from &kaddressbook; and dropping it on the event in &korganizer;. Then, click on the Request toolbar button and the event gets automatically sent to all attendees by email. The recipients get an email containing all the relevant information for the meeting and, if they have configured &kmail; appropriately, the event is automatically inserted in their own &korganizer;. They can respond to the meeting proposal by accepting or rejecting it or by making a counter proposal. All the information is sent by email again and the original organizer of the meeting gets information about the event updated in his/her &korganizer;.

Another 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 click on the Publish toolbar button, 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.

Of course, you have complete control over the data that actually get inserted into your calendar. You can easily reject email containing calendar information which isn't meant for you or in which you are not interested.

Group scheduling adheres to open standards: iTIP (RFC 2446) and iMIP (RFC 2447). These are based on iCalendar, the native file format of &korganizer;. By using these standards, it is possible to exchange group scheduling messages with users of other applications implementing the standards, for example, Evolution and Outlook.

## Setting up &korganizer; for group scheduling

In &korganizer;'s setup, there are two tabs of interest for configuring group scheduling. In the first picture here, you have to enter your name, email address and email client properly.

&korganizer; setup

On the Group Scheduling tab, you can select your Scheduling mail client. Dummy is used only for tests and is not useful for end-users. So it's safe to use Mail Client. The next thing you can select is whether your scheduling messages should be sent directly or first be stored in the Outbox. We suggest to use directly if you have a direct internet access, and Outbox if you use a dial-up connection.

The Outbox has the additional benefit of letting you check your messages before you send them. In the field Additional email addresses you should add all your email addresses you use (including aliases). If you receive your email by using one single email address that is already listed in the first tab, leave the field blank.

&korganizer; setup

The last step for setting up group scheduling in &korganizer; is to enable a filter in your mail client. The filter has to pipe every mail through a small script called korganizerIn. This script is shipped with &korganizer; and can be found in the same folder as the &korganizer; binary (⪚ `/opt/kde3/bin/`). In the picture shown here, you can see an example for the filter settings for &kde;'s mail client &kmail;.

&kmail; filter

## Organizing an event using &korganizer;, example #1

To organize an event for a group, just create an ordinary event and add all attendees in the attendee dialog. The easiest way to add an attendee is to click on the "Addressbook" button and select one attendee from your &kde; addressbook (&kaddressbook;).

Role describes the role an attendee has on this event, ⪚ Participant or Chair. Status informs you whether an attendee already accepted or declined his participation on the event. These settings should both be set carefully. Be sure to set the option Request Response if you want the attendee to answer your event request.

Event attendee

When you've added the new event, you can see it with an icon showing a penguin's head (see the event Meeting in the middle of the picture below). This icon indicates you that you are the organizer of this group scheduling event.

The Organizer icon in &korganizer;

In order to publish an event, just click on it to mark it, and then select Publish from the Schedule menu. A dialog will appear, asking for email addresses. Enter all mail addresses of the people who should attend the your event. After pressing the OK button, the event will either be sent directly to the recipients or - according to your setting - will first be placed in the Outbox.

Publishing an event

The second way to publish an event is to send a Request to the event's attendees, asking them for a reply. The recipients of your posting have the choice to accept or to deny the scheduled event. To publish in this way, just select the event (you must be organizer of this event) and select Request from the Schedule menu.

When you've configured &korganizer; to use the Outbox, you can see the event waiting to be sent out by selecting Outgoing Messages... from the Schedule menu. Send messages in the Outbox sends all the messages listed here. You can also remove queued email by clicking the Remove button.

The Outbox

Double-clicking on the event shows its details:

Event details

## Organizing an event using &korganizer;, example #2

After some time, you should receive feedback from the attendees you invited to the event in example #1. Open the Inbox by selecting Incoming Messages... from the Schedule. To be sure to see all incoming messages, press the Retrieve messages button.

The Inbox

Incoming messages can either be: Reply, Counter, Request, Publish. If a message is not interesting to you, you can still reject it by pressing Reject button. Pressing Accept for a Reply event updates information about the event in your calendar.

The Inbox

Pressing Accept for a Counter event pops up a dialog box with the counter-proposal data. If you accept it, the event will be updated and sent to all attendees. If you decline it, your event settings will be retained.

Counter dialog

## Being an attendee

If you receive a new event (Request or Publish) you can add it to your calendar by pressing the Accept button. If the message method chosen by the sender of that message was Publish, nothing more has to be done by you.

The Inbox

If the message method was Request, your event has an icon like the one on the right bottom. This icon indicates that you should send a Reply to the event's organizer.

The Reply icon in &korganizer;

To see all events that need a reply, you can use the What's next view.

What's next?

Before you send a reply, you should update your attendee data in the event dialog:

Attendee dialog

When you have done so, the event's icon shows three penguin heads to indicate that you are an attendee of that event. Now you should click once on the event (to mark it) and select Reply from the Schedule menu.

If you want to do a counter-proposal, you must change the event's data, and select Counter from the Schedule menu.

The Counter icon in KOrganizer

One other possibility to Reply is not to update your attendee data, but select Reply and use the Reply dialog that appears to change your attendee data.

Reply dialog

If you use the Outbox, you can see the Reply message in your Outbox ...

The Outbox

... and look at its details by double-clicking on it:

Event details

## Credits and license

Contributors:

Original author

- Günter Schwann vogel@sbox.tugraz.at

Additionals texts

- Cornelius Schumacher schumacher@kde.org

Additionals texts

- Klaus Stärk staerk@kde.org

Conversion to DocBook

- Eric Bischoff e.bischoff@noos.fr

&underFDL;