Is it Possible to Thwart Meeting Planner?

[Guest]

Is there any way to prevent meeting requests from automatically appearing in
the calendar before they're accepted? If not, is there a way to make it
apparent to the calendar's owner (and, ideally, his/her delegates) that such
meetings have been *requested* but NOT *confirmed?*

Especially in situations where one person's calendar is maintained by
someone else (e.g., boss/secretary), the inability to do this could cause
serious problems. For instance, any Outlook user with my boss's e-mail
address could send him a meeting request and, because he doesn't make his own
appointments, he would assume that I scheduled it and blithely show up
wherever he was told.

Some possibilities:

A salesperson could corner him for a presentation he'd rather avoid.

A competitor could embarrass him by sending him to a potential client's
office for a non-existent appointment.

A disgruntled employee could 'spam' his calendar with dozens of bogus
meetings to (a) annoy him and (b) make it likely that he'll accidentally
delete something important.

His estranged wife could send him to an unseemly address (a massage parlor,
crack house, etc.) and make him a sitting duck for incriminating photographs
to use in court.

An assassin could sit back and wait for him to 'come to papa!'

Yes, I'm being (mostly) facetious with these examples, but I'm illustrating
a valid point: random individuals should NOT be able to insert an
appointment on someone else's calendar without their permission. And if
there's no way to prevent it, there should at least be a way to make it more
noticeable.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Anything you can offer to help with this problem would be appreciated.

Thanks very much.

Heidi

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

If the user (or delegate) is online at the time the meeting request is received, Outlook will add it to the calendar as a Tentative appointment. In both cases, it's the recipient or delegate who are adding the appointment, not others.

One way to avoid the situation you describe might be to have rules to move meeting requests from those bad people to some other folder for later review.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers