Calendar Item

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

Appointments (with instructions)
Availability entries
Resource reservations
Holidays

Properties

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

Description of the event
Start and end times, including time zones (or all-day 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.

Holidays

Holidays appear on every member's calendar and block out time as busy. Depending on the location of the primary business, public holidays may be periodically updated via an external data source.

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.

Read/Unread

For any given calendar item, ContactsLaw tracks whether it has been read by each member or not.

Calendar items are automatically marked as read when:

The associated activity is commenced
The properties of the item are opened in the Desktop App
A preview of the item is displayed (uninterrupted) for at least 2 seconds in the Desktop App

Calendar items are automatically marked as read by the member who created them.

You can also manually mark calendar items as read or unread.

Desktop App

The Desktop App displays the total number of unread calendar items for a particular member beside the Calendar view in the navigation pane. Viewing items for a different member will also affect the totals. Regardless of the member selected, the totals always pertain to whether the current user has read the items or not.

Recurrence

All types of calendar items can be configured to recur according to a specific pattern, which includes:

Unit (from days to years) and frequency of recurrence
Start and end of the series (can be open-ended)
Whether occurrences must fall within business hours
Any exceptions to the pattern (dates to skip)

Occurrences

Recurring calendar items behave differently depending on whether a specific occurrence has been created or not. Normally, there is only one active occurrence in a series, which is created when the previous occurrence is completed; all subsequent occurrences are "virtual" and cannot be manipulated individually. You can, however, create any individual occurrence manually.

Deleting all occurrences also deletes the series.

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.