5.3. Create

When you see the 4-week calendar in front of us, you will note that the individual dates are links. These links are used to make a new appointment for that specific day. If you don't want that there is always the 'New Appointment' link at the top of the screen. Now lets start making an appointment by clicking on the 'New' option in the upper left part of the menu, or click on a random date. The screen that is shown next is the same as the one you see in the next picture. Other calendar view are available for a single week or even a single day. You can reach those views when you click on the week number in th 4-week calendar or the dayname in the one-week calendar.

On this screen are a number of items and links that might just be worth explaining. So let's do that right here, right now! As you can see, there are a number of pulldown lists to enter a 'Start date' and an 'End date'. Start and end date can be on entirely different dates to indicate for instance a business trip (or a holiday). On the right side of these pulldown lists is the link 'Minical'. When you click on this link a separate window will pop up (as shown in the next picture) in which you can easily select the date you like. To book an appointment for, say, next Thursday is much easier with Minical then calculating the correct date from the top of your head.

The texts "Start time" and "End time" are considered self-explanatory. Again, when in doubt, consult with your nearest colleague. The checkbox "ignore above times" (i.e. the appointment takes place at no particular time on these day(s) ) means exactly that. The "Location" pulldown list is used to enter where this appointment will take place. So "Out" will mean that you have an appointment at a specific location, "Office" means that people will meet you at the office, and the two options "Sick" and "Vacation" can be used to make clear to others that you are either way unavailable for any business related activity. Obviously the "Description" field is for er... adding a description to the appointment.

The "Visit at/Visit from" field can very easily be used to enter the name of the customer you are planning to visit. Just enter part of the name and of that part makes the name unique TUTOS will fill in the blanks when you submit the entered information, or it will present you with a list of contacts that all have the specified text whole or partly in their name. Easy, isn't it?

The same is true for the "Product" field as it is for the "Visit at/Visit from" field. Just enter whole or part of a product (or project as you might remember) and TUTOS will automagically select the right product/project.

The "Resource" section is used to allocate certain resources that are involved in this appointment like beamers, meeting rooms and the like. It is also possible to select multiple participants to this meeting, like for instance other employees of your company or whole teams. You can even 'trace the agree status' to see if all invited participants agree to be at the scheduled appointment. And to do that it would be nice if you could invite them by email, which is coincidentally also an option you can select. The last thing you maybe would like to do is to remind people a little before the meeting that they shouldn't forget to attend and funny enough that option is also available.

Let's just for the sake of argument enter "Invitation to the ball" in the description field, enter "gero" in the "visit to" field and enter "TUTOS" in the product field. We click on the meeting room resource because that is where we shall meet and set the time at 14:00 until 15:00. This is also shown in the next picture.

Now when we click on the "Enter" button we will immediately see the results in our calendar. As you can see in the next picture we made an appointment on what is a national holiday in Spain (something to do with San Juan) and all data is clickable so we can easily jump to the data about contact 'Gero' or product 'TUTOS'. When you think it looks difficult think again! After making 2 or 3 appointments yourself you will find that this TUTOS thing works pretty good.