Managing Events and Invitations

There are a number of ways to manage events and invitations, some of which are through integration with third party cloud services.

Send an Invitation via Email

An iCal is a file format which stores events. Typically these are sent as email attachments to invite attendees to an event. A workflow can be created for an Appointment object as follows:

1. Set the input parameter to the Appointment object (or your custom Meeting object)
2. Use a Generate Document activity; for the Document Template reference an iCal template that has been uploaded to Report Templates in the Documents application
3. Use a Send Email activity with the attachments set to the formula [Generate iCal.Document] ; if your meeting has Documents (such as agenda documents or reference material) then use concat([Input].[Documents],[Generate iCal.Document])

Send an Invitation via AddEvent

Attendees can be sent invitations via the cloud service AddEvent .

1. Sign up for an account at AddEvent (you cannot use Hobby tier)
2. Insert your AddEvent client id and event details into the link below to replace all the values in brackets
3. Add the resulting link to an email notification in a workflow

https://www.addevent.com/dir/?client=[id]&start=[start]&end=[end]&title=[title]&description=[description]&location=[address]&timezone=Australia%2FSydney&service=stream

The last parameter ("stream") directs the service to create a downloadable iCal. Removing the last parameter ("stream") will allow the users to land on an event page, which is a better experience.

Synchronise with an Office 365 Calendar

Microsoft Flow is an integration service which can be  leveraged for a broad range of automation tasks. Here is an example of automatically saving each event created in an Outlook calendar into an Event record in ReadiNow. Note that the JSON body needs to be of type Object and not String for the Flow to succeed. 

The trigger in this example above is a new calendar event, but this approach can be extended to also synchronise deletes and updates made in Outlook. The following example uses a trigger that will fire on add, update and delete of a calendar event.