Calender Invite Oddness

[gbr]

Hi,

I've been having a calendar invite issue, and I have some questions.

When creating a calendar entry in Outlook (with CalDavSychronizer https://sourceforge.net/projects/out...vsynchronizer/) an invitee will get two emails:

- New Appointment: Lunch
- Lunch

The New Appointment: Lunch email is generated by Open XChange.

• Both Outlook and Thunderbird see the email as email. (no accept/decline, etc).
• The web interface shows this as a calendar event with accept/decline, etc

The Lunch email is generated by Outlook.

• Both Outlook and Thunderbird see the email as a calendar event.
• The web interface shows this as a calendar event with the only choice being accept

When creating a calendar entry in Thunderbird or the web interface an invitee gets one email:

- New Appointment: Lunch

• Both Outlook and Thunderbird see the email as email (no accept/decline, etc).
• The web interface shows this as a calendar event with accept/decline, etc

To me, it looks like Open Xchange is doing something wrong with calendar invites.

******************

Well, as I'm writing this, I do another test. I created a calendar entry and invited one person on the same server and another on an outside server. The outside user is running thunderbird.

• the inside person in Outlook and Thunderbird cannot accept the appointment from the email
• the outside person in Thunderbird can accept the appointment from the email.

The difference is the outside person got an attachment with the email: invite.ics. The inside guy did not. Why the difference?

Gerald

ps: Is there any reason the Open Xchange CALDAV implementation does not accept the SCHEDULE-AGENT=CLIENT flag?

[gbr]

Hi,

One of my users just changed an event from today to next week. This created a huge storm of emails. Every user got at least two email from everyone invited to the meeting.

One saying User A changed an event: User B was invited to the meeting. User B was the meeting creator, and the time of the meeting was the original meeting date (today).

The second email saying User A changed an event. A list (incomplete) of users invited to the meeting, and the new date and time.

What the heck is going on? Two of the users in the meeting sent out 8 emails. ( 8 participants in meeting plus organizer). This is crazy.

Gerald

[gbr]

Open-xhange should generate one email, to the meeting originator when the user accepts. That's it.

Instead, each invited user sends a reponse to the distribution list of invited people.

I do have distribution lists set up a bit different.

I'll have a dist list with all users called allusers-group@company.com. Then I'll have a standard user called allusers@company.com that forwards email to allusers-group@company.com.

I do that because my carddav client doesn't understand distribution lists, and doesn't place them in the address book. Creating a forwarding user solves the issue.

Honestly, I'd most likely be using the Outlook Connector, if I could actually get hold of sales.

Gerald

[gbr]

Ok. Part of the problem is because OutlookCaldavSynchronize doesn't understand OX distribution lists, and my workaround for that. So I removed that from my workaround from the loop.

Users still get emails they shouldn't. If User A leaves a meeting, the only one that should get the notification is the event originator. What happens is all other attendees get an email saying the meeting has changed. Why?

Also, I moved an event from 3PM to 2PM. A users accepted the (after I move it) 2:00 PM, and then the 3PM move. I now have two events in the calendar for the same meeting, one at 2 and one at 3. What the heck is going on here?

I've already moved the whole company over to Open-Xchange. It's beginning to feel like a huge mistake. There don't seem to be any OX people in the forums, and no one at the company answers the info@open-xchange.com email. I can't get help, paid for or oherwise.

[gbr]

OX Calendar is fubar, at least under Univention Corporate Server.

I created a meeting, invited a group (distribution list) from the web interface, and no one got an email or the event in the calendar, except me.

WTF?

[Wolfgang Rosenauer]

It's hard to understand what you are describing if you push new different things every few hours btw.

To the first post:
Within the OX solution there is no need to send around attachments with invites because the system handles it already correct if you use OX.
You can enable to send the invites to internal users as well though:
notification.properties: imipForInternalUsers = true
Please note that users can even more easy break the whole interoperability thing when they connect e.g. Thunderbird via caldav and start to accept and create yet new appointments from the attachment. There are many scenarios which could be even more broken using that. But feel free to test.

What you are describing with mail storms I cannot easily follow. Every user has
1. the choice what to receive
2. the choice to notify everyone about changes

In your comment 4 it looks like the user accepted your appointment with another client which exactly caused what I wrote above: It created a duplicate from the information in his attachment?
In general in OX if your client works with the ICS attachments it's dangerous because you might create clones when you sync the calendar back to OX.

Your comment 5 I cannot comment on because there is too much information missing.

We are obviously using our calendar internally for everything and heavily and usually it works quite well.

[gbr]

Thanks for the response.

No one here uses the web interface unless they are out of town. Everyone uses Outlook or Thunderbird.

After no response on my original message(s), I thought I'd push as much info as I could (as I was testing) to see if something jogged someone's memory.

In settings on the web interface, I see a bunch of 'what to receive' flags, but no what to send flags. Does setting 'Receive notification for appointment changes' stop a meeting organizer from getting notifications?

If I could actually get a response from info@open-xchange.com, I would love to try the Outlook Connector to see if that solves our problems.

Gerald

[Wolfgang Rosenauer]

The "send flag" is just a checkbox in the appointment edit interface. But as you said, your users do not seem to use this to create appointments. I do not know anything about this Outlook/CalDAV connector but at least we support officially Thunderbird/Lightning .
(I'm not in charge of or related to info@ but I pinged someone to check what happened to your mails.)