Calendaring is the process of creating and maintaining appointments and meetings. Appointments and meetings are stored in calendars, which are folders in the Exchange store. An appointment represents an activity that takes place on a particular date and at a specific time. A meeting is an appointment that involves more than one individual.

You can use calendaring with Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 to:

• Create single or recurring appointments.
• Send requests to others to invite them to a meeting.
• Check when others are free or busy.
• Schedule the use of conference rooms and other resources.

Exchange Server 2003 provides a calendar for each mailbox. In addition, appointments and meetings can be placed in public folders for group calendars.

Appointments and meetings typically have a start time and an end time. Recurring appointments and meetings have multiple instances that follow a pattern. For example, you can schedule meetings that always occur at 10:00 A.M. on the first Monday of each month.

Meeting requests are sent out to invite attendees to participate in a meeting. The person sending the meeting request is called the organizer. Meeting requests are a special type of message. An attendee can respond to a meeting request by accepting, tentatively accepting, or declining. Meeting responses are also special types of messages. The organizer's copy of the meeting maintains a list of attendees and their responses.

If you send a meeting request, and later you want to make changes to the meeting, you can send an update to the attendees. As the meeting organizer, you can cancel the meeting and send a message to inform the attendees of the cancellation. Attendees cannot cancel a meeting; however, they can decline a meeting that they have already accepted.

Instead of inviting attendees to a meeting, you can publish an appointment. For example, you can send employees the list of company holidays. A published appointment has no attendees.

Finally, appointment and meeting requests can have attachments. When you send a meeting request, the attachment is sent as part of the message. An attachment can be almost anything, for example, a map showing a meeting location.

This topic covers the following information:

Calendars in Exchange 2000 Server

Calendars on the Internet

Time Zones