Hello there,

We just purchased Complete about 10 days ago, and I am trying to find out how to add multiple people to one appointment and send out an invitation.

Also, is there a way to see if people are "available"?

Basically, I am looking for a functionality similar to Outlook or Meeting Maker where you can schedule meetings, invite different people (inside or outside of your organization), attach the iCal invitation to an e-mail and allow the people to "ACCEPT," "SUGGEST ALTERNATE TIME," "DECLINE," etc.

Is any of that available in Complete?

Thank you so much!

Hi,

Some of that is available in Complete, but much of this you'll have to craft yourself, especially around invitations.

Here is what you can start with...

• SeedCode supports having multiple staff members on an event: just format the staff field to be checkboxes.

• There is a script in place to send email notifications to staff about upcoming events. The script is "Email Notification 1 - Notify Staff of Upcoming Events" and you can find a few nuggets in here, including how to get the email addresses for all staff members on the event. (More on email notifications here)

• The calendar lets you "see" if someone is available, but only shows this visually, there isn't any script in there to test to see if a given staffer/contact/resource has a conflict at a given date / time. Conflicts are just shown visually.

So, if you really want to get at something like Meeting Maker you have a lot to do, especially if you want people to be able to respond outside of FileMaker, using email or iCal.

Here are some things to think about...

- It is pretty easy to add a join table to SeedCode so an event can have multiple contacts, not just multiple staff members.

- If you really want your contacts to use iCal to respond, etc. you may want to test using Zulu for this. Support for invitations is kind of limited now but will be getting better. More on the limitations here\

- If you want folks to be able to accept invitations by email and they aren't using Zulu, that means teaching FileMaker to read inbound mail, etc. Cool, but not simple.

- If everyone is a FileMaker user you could build an FMP interface for accepting invitations (perhaps "accepted" is a field in the join table between a contact and an event). Obviously keeping this all in FMP gives you a lot more options.

- I hope that helps get you started. We're definitely into building custom things like this, so please don't hesitate to get in touch if you'd like to take this discussion further.

Best,

John

Thank you so much for your reply, John.

That helps a lot.

We will try to do some things internally, following your advice. And I can contact you offline to discuss customization.

We will be working on implementing a Demo version of Zulu to test it with our SeedCode, and hope to purchase it soon.

All the best!
Sandra