Call invitations, status change

[diamonddog]

Hello,

right now after sending invitastion to call participants and after they accepted, the user must manually change the status for each participants from "tentative" to "accepted" in the call/attendees section.

Are there any plans to automate that?

Thanks and congrats to your CRM.

[yuri]

Hi,

If participants clicks Accept then it should be changed to Accepted. I don't understand.

[diamonddog]

You mean the entry for each invited attendee changes automatically from "none" to "accepted" in the attendees section once the email with the acceptance note has come in? Does not work in my case. Maybe I am doing something wrong.

[yuri]

Once recipient have clicked "Accept" link in the invitation email.

[diamonddog]

Now, considering two scenarios:

1. A call invitation is sent out via Espo to a third party email client: In case of Outlook or Thunderbird the standard "accept" / "decline" buttons are found on the top of the email. But Espo itself adds three extra buttons into the invitation email: "accept", "tentative" and "decline". When hitting these buttons, the status of a participant invited changes automatically to "accepted" within the call entry. So far, so good.

2. Contrary, when hitting the standard "accept" button in Outlook or Thunderbird only (which most of recipients would probably do), the status within Espo call entry remains unchanged. Nothing happens.

Other than that, when people sent an invitation from third party email clients, the Espo email client shows only the invitation email without any possibility to accept or decline (empty body).

Any ideas?

[alasdaircr]

The standard Accept button doesn't show in Outlook for me though. Are you saying Espo sends invites which cause those RSVP buttons to appear?

[alasdaircr]

One thing which is a problem, is the invitiation is sent to the User who created the meeting, despite having this attendance set as 'Accepted' by default.

[alasdaircr]

I just noticed that my email client (Fastmail) hides the Accept / Decline / Tentative buttons and shows the ics contents as a Calendar entry but with no Accept / Decline buttons :-/

Certainly this feature could be improved

[yuri]

Any suggestions how it can be improved?

[alasdaircr]

I had looked into it a while ago, and read up on the ICS format. I just have other priorities, and can't work on Espo stuff full-time.

Ideally ICS would support triggering a webrequest rather than emailing the 'RSVP', but as far as I know that's not possible. So Espo would have to monitor a particular email account which originated the invitation request.

Also invitations sent via Espo are not causing the RSVP buttons to appear in Outlook. Invitations sent from other clients (even Fastmail) do. I think this is a simpler issue and just due to the ICS details not being 'inlined' in the body of the email.

I can send over raw messages examples so you can see the difference.

[alasdaircr]

So I thought that this was just a nightmare to work up - including the monitoring part. So I began work on an Exchange Web Services connector. My thought was that this would proxy all meeting requests handling. Espo would create the invitation in Exchange via some SOAP calls. I got quite far in this, including synchronization of Contacts between Exchange and Espo.

However we are likely to move to Office 365 in house fairly soon and that API is much cleaner so I decided to wait until that was in place, and then re-visit the Exchange <-> Espo connector idea.

Obviously this isn't much use for anyone who doesn't use Microsoft Exchange..

[alasdaircr]

Another thing would be to look at any other CRM systems and see how they've tackled this. It's an industry wide problem

[alasdaircr]

Look at this from https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/issues/175 :

• Outlook and Mac Mail only show their RSVP buttons if you add the ICS content in the way that PHPMailer has implemented it. They will not show RSVP buttons if the ICS file is simply attached.
• Gmail only shows its "Add to calendar" wrapper (its equivalent to RSVP buttons) if the ICS file is attached. The event is only added to your Google Calendar if the ICS file is attached.
• When sending an invite from Outlook, the ICS content is added the way PHPMailer has implemented it. Thus, Outlook and Mac Mail will recognize it but Gmail will not.
• When sending an invite from Mac Mail/iCal, the ICS file is attached. Thus, Gmail will recognize it but Outlook and Mac Mail will not.
• When sending an invite from Gmail/Google Calendar, the ICS file is attached AND the ICS content is added the way PHPMailer has implemented it. Thus, all three clients will recognize it.

[marcusquinn]

Did this get solved?