Ok – will you grant me (Doug) a rant please? Whenever I try to “open” an email with one of those calendar invites, it seizes my cursor – and doesn’t return it to me for at least 3 minutes (sometimes perpetually, freezing). I have a Thinkpad T14 – brand new – with an intel i7 vpro chip and 11th-gen processor. It’s super-fast – but it’s brought completely to its knees when I open a single, solitary calendar invite. It might have something to do with the fact that our I.T. guy has our Microsoft Outlook Exchange server locked down like crazy. He’s super-security conscious. For his part, he thinks these calendar invites are WAY too big of a risk anyway. He says the whole idea that we would let an external email make a change to our secure calendars is just enticing someone to write a virus to attack our Outlook accounts. If the virus hasn’t already been written, I’m betting it will be. To compound the whole thing, I don’t want an external email having the capacity to make calendar decisions for me anyway. To me, it’s too personal of a decision. I should be able to look at my own calendar and decide if I can do that, without someone externally “graying in” a meeting on my calendar. To me, it’s just too weird. Finally, and this is actually as big of a deal as any, sometimes the time zone decisions just don’t work. Outlook is a bit quirky on time zones. For example, if I set a 10 am appt. for my trip to California, I mark it on my calendar for 10am because that’s the “local time” I’ll be observing while I’m in California. But when I add that appt., it LOOKS to my calendar like I added it in Eastern Time zone. If I tell Outlook that it’s a 10am Pacific appt, then while I’m in Eastern time back at my Louisville office, Outlook shows it on my calendar as 7am. That’s ok if I’m in Louisville. But suppose I’m flying to California two days prior. I WANT it to be on my calendar for 10 LOCAL time – not 10am Pacific. Because on that day, 10am will be LOCAL for me. The whole thing is … too crazy to let an external email book things for me.

I know. It’s a soapbox. To me, it’s a failed idea that should never have been allowed out of the gate – for ANYone who ever travels across time zones and ANYone who is security conscious. : )

So what am I advocating? “Down with calendar invites!” hahaha But even if you want to continue to use them, my recommendation is that you ask first, before assuming. Not everyone will want you to force something into their calendars like that. So my humble and gentle suggestion is to: Ask first – calendar later.

Thanks for listening. Now it’s my turn to listen to you. What do YOU think of calendar invites? : ) Click comment to let us know.

Doug

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