Display Cancelled Meetings - Perhaps it's not what you think....
Category Lotus Notes Tips Lotus Notes and Domino Issues
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One of the new features in Lotus Notes 8 was a new preference setting in your Calendar that would allow Notes to process meeting cancellations automatically for you, and allow you to specify if you want the cancelled meetings "removed from calendar", or "shown as cancelled in calendar" after Notes automatically processed them:
As soon as I saw this, I (like many others) assumed that with this setting on and configured to "show as cancelled in calendar" I get to see those cancelled meetings in my calendar forever, or until I decide to remove them from there. I know now that this was not the intent of IBM-Lotus programmers when they put this in. Help file is very unhelpful in this case, as it does not really explain anything, and it just restates the obvious:
The article "Keep your Inbox cleaner - set preferences for meeting invitations (Lotus Notes 8.x Tips)" by Julia Brown on IBM's developerWorks made me realise what this feature is all about.
First, you have to decide if you want Notes to automatically process meeting cancellation notices for you (new in Notes 8), or if you want to continue with the pre-8 functionality, that is manually process each cancellation by opening cancellation notice delivered to your Inbox. By default, automatic processing is turned off unless your administrator changed that through the policy document. After enabling autoprocessing of meeting cancellation notices, you get two choices that are otherwise grayed out:
1. Remove from Calendar - when you pick this option, the cancellation notice will not appear in your Inbox folder at all because as soon as router delivers it to your mailbox, it will be processed and the meeting document will be removed from your calendar. The caveat with this is that you will never know "what hit you...". You'll look at your calendar at one point, and you'll says to yourself: "Geeee, I could swear I had a meeting at 1 pm today, what the heck happened to it?" You may even decide to call your HelpDesk to tell them "I think Notes sucks because it keeps deleting my meetings from my calendar...."
2. Show as cancelled in calendar - when you pick this option, the cancellation notice will appear in your Inbox folder, and the cancelled meeting will also appear in your calendar (although router processed the cancellation notice as soon as it was delivered to your mailbox), but ONLY until you either opened the cancellation notice in your Inbox (including displaying it in preview pane), or opened the cancelled meeting document in your calendar. As soon as you do that, Notes removes the cancelled meeting form your calendar. And this is where the confusion sets in. It removes it to keep your calendar "less cluttered". It was never intended to keep it in there indefinitely, therefore you cannot say that this is broken and needs to be fixed. How is this different then from not having autoprocessing of meeting cancellation notices turned on? The main goal here is to free up your time in the "free time lookup" database so that people can see you as available in the time slot originally occupied by the cancelled meeting. Even if you did not get a chance to acknowledge the cancellation notice yet (perhaps you are away for a few days), people trying to invite you to a different meeting scheduled on the same date and at the same time as the cancelled meeting, will not see you as available. After cancellation notice was processed by the router, cancelled meetings show in your calendar in different colour with a different icon until you actually opened the cancellation notice in my Inbox, or opened the cancelled meeting document in my calendar at which point they will be removed:
[ screen shot]
The fact that cancelled meeting document disappears from the calendar after user opened the cancellation notice or the cancelled meeting document does not sit well with some of our users. It looks like some people outside our organization did not like that either (see "Cancelled Meeting does not Show up in Calendar - IBM's Answer" post on Notes 8 forum by Shawn J Kiser.) Here's IBM's position on this:
"The associated SPR (KWSR7LZQ2G) has been closed as "No Plans to fix in this release". Another SPR (MSTR7LDLCW) describes the same symptoms, against v8.5. The status of SPR (MSTR7LDLCW) is currently "Closed/enhancement request". Thusly, feature development is treating this issue as an enhancement request: We are adding further customer reports of this issue to SPR (MSTR7LDLCW) -- so the customer impact is reflected in the weighting. If weight increases sufficiently, as a result of any additional customer reports, the issue may be reconsidered for an upcoming maintenance or feature release"
I suppose all this makes sense if you keep in mind that the main objective of this feature was to free up your time in the "free time lookup" database so that people can see you as available even if you did not get a chance to process the cancellation notice yet.
Bookmark :
One of the new features in Lotus Notes 8 was a new preference setting in your Calendar that would allow Notes to process meeting cancellations automatically for you, and allow you to specify if you want the cancelled meetings "removed from calendar", or "shown as cancelled in calendar" after Notes automatically processed them:
As soon as I saw this, I (like many others) assumed that with this setting on and configured to "show as cancelled in calendar" I get to see those cancelled meetings in my calendar forever, or until I decide to remove them from there. I know now that this was not the intent of IBM-Lotus programmers when they put this in. Help file is very unhelpful in this case, as it does not really explain anything, and it just restates the obvious:
The article "Keep your Inbox cleaner - set preferences for meeting invitations (Lotus Notes 8.x Tips)" by Julia Brown on IBM's developerWorks made me realise what this feature is all about.
First, you have to decide if you want Notes to automatically process meeting cancellation notices for you (new in Notes 8), or if you want to continue with the pre-8 functionality, that is manually process each cancellation by opening cancellation notice delivered to your Inbox. By default, automatic processing is turned off unless your administrator changed that through the policy document. After enabling autoprocessing of meeting cancellation notices, you get two choices that are otherwise grayed out:
1. Remove from Calendar - when you pick this option, the cancellation notice will not appear in your Inbox folder at all because as soon as router delivers it to your mailbox, it will be processed and the meeting document will be removed from your calendar. The caveat with this is that you will never know "what hit you...". You'll look at your calendar at one point, and you'll says to yourself: "Geeee, I could swear I had a meeting at 1 pm today, what the heck happened to it?" You may even decide to call your HelpDesk to tell them "I think Notes sucks because it keeps deleting my meetings from my calendar...."
2. Show as cancelled in calendar - when you pick this option, the cancellation notice will appear in your Inbox folder, and the cancelled meeting will also appear in your calendar (although router processed the cancellation notice as soon as it was delivered to your mailbox), but ONLY until you either opened the cancellation notice in your Inbox (including displaying it in preview pane), or opened the cancelled meeting document in your calendar. As soon as you do that, Notes removes the cancelled meeting form your calendar. And this is where the confusion sets in. It removes it to keep your calendar "less cluttered". It was never intended to keep it in there indefinitely, therefore you cannot say that this is broken and needs to be fixed. How is this different then from not having autoprocessing of meeting cancellation notices turned on? The main goal here is to free up your time in the "free time lookup" database so that people can see you as available in the time slot originally occupied by the cancelled meeting. Even if you did not get a chance to acknowledge the cancellation notice yet (perhaps you are away for a few days), people trying to invite you to a different meeting scheduled on the same date and at the same time as the cancelled meeting, will not see you as available. After cancellation notice was processed by the router, cancelled meetings show in your calendar in different colour with a different icon until you actually opened the cancellation notice in my Inbox, or opened the cancelled meeting document in my calendar at which point they will be removed:
[ screen shot]
The fact that cancelled meeting document disappears from the calendar after user opened the cancellation notice or the cancelled meeting document does not sit well with some of our users. It looks like some people outside our organization did not like that either (see "Cancelled Meeting does not Show up in Calendar - IBM's Answer" post on Notes 8 forum by Shawn J Kiser.) Here's IBM's position on this:
"The associated SPR (KWSR7LZQ2G) has been closed as "No Plans to fix in this release". Another SPR (MSTR7LDLCW) describes the same symptoms, against v8.5. The status of SPR (MSTR7LDLCW) is currently "Closed/enhancement request". Thusly, feature development is treating this issue as an enhancement request: We are adding further customer reports of this issue to SPR (MSTR7LDLCW) -- so the customer impact is reflected in the weighting. If weight increases sufficiently, as a result of any additional customer reports, the issue may be reconsidered for an upcoming maintenance or feature release"
I suppose all this makes sense if you keep in mind that the main objective of this feature was to free up your time in the "free time lookup" database so that people can see you as available even if you did not get a chance to process the cancellation notice yet.
