Best Practices for Calendar Meetings and Invitations

  • Act on invitations as you receive them (Accept, Accept as Tentative, or Decline). Do not just delete meeting requests even if you intend to not attend. By making a choice, you keep the meeting organizer apprised of the meeting attendance and reduce the chance of lost meetings.
  • Do not decline a meeting until you are certain you will not be attending. When you decline a meeting, the meeting invitation moves to your "Deleted Items" folder. If you then empty that folder, the meeting invitation will be lost. If your schedule changes so that you can make a meeting, you will no longer have the meeting details available to you.
  • Do not drag an instance of a recurring meeting to a new date or time. If you need to change the date or time for a single instance of a recurring meeting, delete that instance for all attendees, then recreate it in the new location.
  • Always have an end date for a recurring meeting. Failure to do so can result in corrupt meeting data if the recurring meeting is modified.
  • Avoid modifying the end date of a recurring meeting. Even if your recurring meeting has an end date, if you modify the end date of the meeting series, exceptions associated with the recurring meeting are lost.
  • Avoid changing details about a recurring meeting. Changes to recurring meetings do not propagate to mobile devices.
  • Do not forward meeting requests to other recipients. Forwarding invitations does not add recipients to attendee lists, and updates will not be sent to new attendees. Instead, have the meeting organizer add the new attendees and send an update to the original meeting.
  • Only accept or decline meetings from the Inbox; don't do this from the calendar or other mail folders. Meetings responded to from outside the Inbox may result in missed updates or meetings.
  • Only make personal notes in meetings as the organizer; not as an attendee. Doing so as an attendee will result in lost notes if a meeting update is sent later.
  • Only interact with meeting requests from one piece of software - Outlook (Macintosh or Windows), a mobile device, Blitz Web Access, or other clients that you may be using. Due to the different methods of synchronization by various clients or web browsers, it is easy to have multiple or conflicting replies to a single request which will result in deleted or otherwise corrupted calendar data.
Print Article