Calendar Item

ContactsLaw supports several different types of items (or events) that may appear on a calendar:

• Appointments (with instructions),
• Availability entries; or
• Resource reservations

Properties

Regardless of type, all calendar items have the following properties:

• Description of the event
• Start and end times (including all-day and recurring events)
• Organiser member
• Notes (in Markdown format)
• Optional matter

Appointments

Appointments schedule work and include instructions to perform particular activities in ContactsLaw, such as recording time or creating a matter.

Starting an appointment commences the associated activity.

Availability

Availability entries have no associated instruction and are simply used to block out time as free or busy.

Reservations

Members can reserve non-venue resources (such as parking bays, shared computers, etc), helping to avoid collisions and overbookings.

Attendees

The organiser of an appointment or availability entry can invite attendees in the form of other members or external contacts.

Attendees may be required or optional, and responses are recorded when an attendee accepts or declines their invitation.

Venues

Appointments can be assigned to a particular venue. Venues may be either:

• A resource whose occupancy (capacity) can be taken into account when scheduling; or
• Free-form text describing an address or other location (for which collision checking is not performed).

Scheduling

Various features are included to schedule calendar items, all based around detecting and resolving scheduling conflicts.

A scheduling conflict occurs when the proposed calendar item overlaps with another item on a calendar belonging to one of the attendees (or the resource consumed by the item). If an attendee has not responded to the invitation, or if their response is Accepted or Tentative¹, then a scheduling conflict occurs. If their response is Declined, a scheduling conflict does NOT occur. Scheduling conflicts occur for both Required and Optional¹ attendees.

Settings determine whether ContactsLaw assumes members are free or busy during empty periods on their calendar. By default, members are assumed to be free.

¹ This is the default behaviour. You can choose to ignore Tentative responses and/or Optional attendees on an individual basis.

Synchronisation

ContactsLaw supports 2-way synchronisation for calendar items, via integration with Microsoft 365. You can configure settings for this feature in your member profile.