Meeting attendees

[bmac]

Does DejaOffice/CompanionLink intend to offer ICS generation when listing attendees for a meeting? This would be very helpful. Also, it would be nice if DO would not automatically use the attendee address as the location of the meeting. In line with this, the location field in adding a meeting should be moved up under the name/subject of the meeting.

Great product!

[DJOCTO]

bmac,

In the near future, we are going to beef up the location field. We need to pioneer a bit here because neither Outlook nor Act! has the beef we need. We need to make a selector that a) allows you to select a location from any attendee, b) select from a sweet list of my locations, c) do a lookup, d) add an ad-hoc location. In all cases, the location needs to translate into a physical address and a GPS address. This is for use of mapping systems.

I anticipate these changes over the next 2-3 months as we prepare for Google Glass. The key to Glass and other "wearable" technology is that they will be notification systems, not CRM databases. With a notification we need to have the "beef pre-sliced", as it were, so that it can feed mapping, texting and notification functions.

[bmac]

thanks,, I appreciate your message, and your roadmap is very interesting.

I may have used the wrong terminology but my message also included the idea that when I include an attendee in a meeting, it automatically sends a calendar invite to that attendee assuming that the attendee has an email address in my contact list. Right now, I believe, I can only list the attendee, but nothing else happens. In Outlook, obviously, I can send an invite and that person is invited to the meeting with a calendar entry to include on that person's calendar be it Google or Outlook.

[DJOCTO]

I will note the request of sending an invite. Right now the system does not send invites, or modify them. This is because I'm thinking the prospect is rather daunting. On a simple level, you can make a change and it can send an invite. But on a more complex level, if our customer is synchronized to Outlook, the meeting is already an invite, so it is a modification of an existing invite that must go out of Outlook to be valid. This is a lot of effort where we probably will disappoint a lot of people. Right now it seems advantageous not to do invites, than to do them knowing that some will not work as expected for some people.

In the larger picture, by late 2014 we will probably incorporate Email and EAS sync into DejaOffice. At that time the invite process will be smoother because we will "own" the original incoming invite. Look for this to be resolved by end of year.