Chapter 11. KOrganizer workshop: Group scheduling

Günter Schwann <vogel@sbox.tugraz.at>

Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher@kde.org>

Klaus Stärk <staerk@kde.org>

Editor: Eric Bischoff
Revision 3.1 (2002-10-17)

This version of the KOrganizer workshop “Group Scheduling” was released on October 17, 2002. See the ChangeLog for details.

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.