3.2. Free Busy Information
KDE clients can publish their calendar summary information on the Kolab server. Other users can check for availability of desired attendees for an eventual event before issuing the invitation. Meeting can on this way be scheduled more efficiently and in accordance with the attendee's free time slots.
When an event (invitation) is accepted it is added to the user's personal calendar and hers free-busy list gets updated (then published). A free-busy list contains only the event times data.
Let us go through a practical example about how to take advantage of this useful feature:
User A (Name = giroday2) want to invite User B (Name = Michel Boyer de la Giroday) to a meeting and create an event.
After having registered Michel Boyer de la Giroday as its Attendee in the Attendees page of the Edit Event dialog, User A (Name = giroday2) can view automatically the availability of User B (Michel Boyer de la Giroday) at the date and time of the planned meeting as shown below:
To make this example understandable, you must know that User B was busy with another appointment between 08:00 and 12:00 at the date of the meeting (2003-03-19). You can see on the view above, that this time interval is colored in red, for the Attendee Michel Boyer de la Giroday, meaning that he is busy at this time. Nice feature, is not it?
At this stage, User A (giroday2) can setup the time of hers appointment automatically by simply pushing the Pick a date button, which will pops up a message box proposing a better time for the appointment.
Just click on the OK button to validate the time proposed automatically it will be registered in your calendar view as displayed below:
