Updating a meeting

I've got a meeting and I need to move it. So how do I update a meeting, how do I say we need to hold this at a different time or I need to invite some different people to the meeting or hey, guess what? I have some notes to put in this meeting for you to read before we attend it. All of those things are possible in OWA. So I'm going to open up my meeting. Here's my original meeting request and here's my tracking. I can tell that I have some people who accepted, but even if I don't know that. Even if all I know was that I've send out the invitation, people are already thinking about it.

They're designing oh, I should go to that. I'll need to move these other things I'm doing in order to attend. So if I want to, I can add more people to meeting. Let's try to take a look at that first. We're going to add Judith to this meeting, because I'm really doing this project because she wants me to and I'd like to know something. Notice that I marked as busy then and so as Olivia, but that's because at this meeting. If I look down here, it would encourage me to move this meeting to a time that we were all available. I have to be aware and look up here and say, oh, 11 o'clock Monday, that's why we're all busy, because OWA is trying to find a new time we can all attend. The truth is Judith is available, we're already going to the meeting, so we're all in really good shape.

So I've added Judith and I want to click now Send Update. Watch what happens when I do. When I click the Send Update, I have two choices. One choice is you've added somebody or you've deleted somebody from the meeting. Only send an update to those folks, that's the default choice. So in this case only Judith would get an update or send an update to all attendees. Now all OWA knows is that the meeting has changed because I have added or deleted some people.

If I have also changed something else like left some notes out on the Appointment tab, it won't necessarily automatically say I should send updates to all attendees. But even if all I've done is what I did here to add Judith, the question remains should everybody now get an update, so they look and they go, okay somebody else has been added. My other choice here before I do this is to go out to the Appointment tab and right here say, I added Judith to the meeting for her data expertise.

Remember of course that if you don't like Times New Roman, remember that you can just choose another font and you can change the sizes and everything. This is an area where I can format the text I enter. So I added Judith to the meeting. I'm going over tracking. I have somebody who's already accepted, so they know what they're doing. I'm going to click Send Update and I could send it to all attendees, which is how I left this a moment ago or I could send it only to the added or deleted. I'm going to send it to everybody. Everybody now has an update, let's go back and open this same appointment.

Now the fact that I sent an update, I didn't change the time. So OWA assumes that Olivia is still accepting. I haven't heard yet from Judith, there's been no response. That's okay, we're going to wait and find out what she has to say. What else might I change about his meeting? Well, we could decide that it needs to be at a different time. I'm going to move it to 1 o'clock for example. I have something else I need to do in the morning. I'm going to move it to 1 o'clock, always go back to the scheduling assistant and see if people are available.

Notice here's the old appointment time. I'm coming so as Olivia. This meeting time is marked as tentative on Judith's calendar even if she's not in the office. This is a feature to avoid other people trying to hit her calendar with appointments at the same time. They'll see that there's already something tentative. They don't know why it's tentative. It could be that Judith has a tentative appointment, it could be that it's a meeting that's already waiting for her to reply, so tentative is its default setting, but it doesn't matter. If I'm someone else trying to schedule meetings, I actually want to avoid this time, there's something else there.

So even if Judith is out of the office, this will sit there as tentative, because I hit invited her to that time. But now we're going to move it to 1 o'clock. So I'm going to go ahead and send an update. I want you to notice two things; one, the obvious thing is, this meeting just moved on my calendar. I don't get to accept or decline. I'm the meeting owner. So if I say 1 o'clock, it is 1 o'clock. But notice also I was not asked if I wanted to send this to only some attendees.

I change the time, it just got set to everyone. So both Judith and Olivia have received this. Notice also, when Olivia said yes before, she said yes to a meeting at 11 o'clock, not to a 1 o'clock meeting. So the tracking has been reset. Olivia hasn't accepted for 1 o'clock, just like Judith hasn't accepted at all. So when I change the time or date for a meeting and then send the update, OWA automatically resets the response status and asks each of the attendees again, do you want to come to this meeting? So when an attendee goes and takes a look in their inbox, they'll actually see that there's been an update for this meeting and they can go ahead and look and say oh I can come then or I can't.

If I go take a look at my email, I'll notice that there are a whole lot of meetings. There is the original and the acceptance. But then I have the changes that I've made and each of the times that this has been sent. This first, the new invitation, we sent to Judith, then we've sent meeting updates to other people. So I can go back, wait for more information to come in here if I wish and go then and see whether Judith and Olivia are coming to the meeting. Let's see what this looks like from the recipient's point of view.

We have a weekly staff meeting actually that was sent out earlier. Judith sent it out and it was going to be at 3:30. Here's that original invitation. If I go and click on it I can see it and this banner says This appointment is out of date. Let me say that in another way. This meeting has changed since you got this email. That's exactly what this means, out of date means it's no longer correct, it is obsolete. So if I go now to the next item right here, I can see the appointment used to be at 3 is now at 3:30.

I can say, okay I'll attend this meeting. I have already done that, so that's great. That's what it looks like in your Inbox when a meeting has been changed. In this case, I had even deleted this meeting. I had accepted it and it was all fine and it's shuffled off to the Deleted Items folder, because Judith had updated it. So when you see that you have an update that means that something has changed about the meeting and that either the time or date has shifted or the meeting organizer specifically wants you to know that you've been added to the meeting, that you've been deleted from a meeting, another possibility, or that there are other details that they want to ensure you know about.

Now you'll remember that there's more than one way to change an appointment and there's more than one way to change a meeting. We've been using the message forms here in the inbox to modify this meeting. But if I go to my calendar, here is the meeting right here and just as with an appointment, it has handles and I can move it or I can change its duration. So if I move this meeting, when I release my mouse button, notice I'm told you must send an update to meeting attendees if you're going to change the time or date; and clicking Send Meeting Updates here is exactly the same as if I were to open the form, change the time and then click Send Update.

So even when I change my meeting time or duration using drag and drop here in a Calendar View, OWA is making sure that all of my attendees are kept up-to-date about this meeting.