Technically, any event in your Calendar counts as an appointment, whether it's a reminder for your best friend's birthday or a reminder of a doctor's appointment for a checkup. However, when you invite people to an appointment or you get invited to one, regardless of whether it's a face-to-face meeting or a phone conference, that appointment then becomes a meeting.
Sending a meeting request
Sending a meeting request to others is very similar to creating a calendar appointment. Follow these steps to send a meeting request:
1. Open Calendar.
2. With Calendar open, press the trackwheel and then select New from the contextual menu that appears.
3. Fill in the key appointment information (subject/location/time).
4. Press the trackwheel once and select Invite Attendee.
You're taken to Address Book to select your meeting attendee.
5. From the Address Book:
• If you have contacts in your Address Book: Highlight the contact you want and press the trackwheel.
• If you don't yet have any contacts or if the one you want isn't in your Address Book: Use the Use Once option to enter the appropriate email address and press the ENTER key to finish and return to Calendar.
6. After returning from Address Book, you see the attendees in your Calendar meeting notice.
7. Press the trackwheel and choose Save from the contextual menu that appears.
This action sends an email to your meeting attendees, inviting them to your meeting.
Responding to a meeting request
If you've ever worked in an office, you've likely gotten a meeting request by email, asking you to respond to the meeting by three options: Accept, Tentative, or Decline. (If it's from your boss for an all-staff meeting and you just can't afford to decline again because it's so close to Christmas bonus time, that's an Accept.)
Fortunately (sometimes, unfortunately), you can accept any meeting request from your managers or colleagues on your BlackBerry just as you would on your desktop PC. In PC world, you respond to an email request for a meeting by clicking the appropriate button in your email client (Microsoft Outlook, for the vast majority of you out there.) In BlackBerry world, a meeting request also comes in the form of an email; upon reading the email, just choose from Accept/Tentative/Decline in the Message application, as shown in Figure 1. Your response is sent back in an email.
Figure 1: Of course, you can make it to yet another meeting!
After you initially respond to the meeting request, the meeting is added to your Calendar automatically. Of course, if you have a change of heart later, you can certainly change your response (yes, you can later decline that useless meeting) in Calendar.
