General tips for Catmail Calendar

Responding to and updating calendar invitations 

• Respond to all calendar invitations in your Inbox: When you receive an invite, always open the invite and use the accept/tentative/decline buttons to respond. If you delete the invite without responding can result in your calendar getting out of sync. Likewise, moving a meeting request to another folder before you respond to it can cause problems. 

• Change from accepting to declining: If you are unable to attend a meeting you already accepted, open the meeting and "decline" it rather than just deleting the entry from your calendar. 

• Do not add notes to a meeting you do not own: As a meeting attendee, if you add your own private notes to the body of a meeting request in your calendar, those notes will disappear if the meeting owner updates their version. 

• Always send updates to all (for meeting owners): If you modify or cancel a meeting, make sure to click the option to send an update to all attendees, otherwise, some attendees' invitations could get out of sync. 

Establishing and updating recurring meetings 

• Always set an end date: Open-ended recurring meetings can become corrupt if they are modified on a regular basis. To avoid this problem, always set an end date for the series. 

• Avoid frequent changes: Recurring meetings can become lost or duplicated if they are modified too many times. If you have a series that requires many changes, like multiple location changes, cancel the series for everyone and create individual meetings instead. 

• Cancel a recurring meeting: Open the meeting series and set the end date to match the day of the last meeting that was held. Then send an update to all attendees. This will preserve historical entries for the old meetings while removing all of the future versions. Never just delete a recurring meeting. 

• Changing owners: You cannot change the owner of a recurring meeting. Instead, cancel the old series (see above) and then have the new organizer create a new series. 

• Modifying individual meetings in a series: You can modify an individual meeting in a series. Just make sure to send updates to everyone, and keep in mind that any changes made later to the series will wipe out the changes you made to the individual instance. 

Managing delegate calendars 

• Stick to one version of Outlook for managing delegate(s) calendars. If you edit a delegate's calendar from multiple Outlook versions it can cause problems with that calendar.