Coming Soon: Create iCal and Exchange Calendar Events with Workflow 9.1

Written by Joanna Slusarz

Published: November 4, 2013

1 View

By Sarah Seene
Technical Writer

Business processes often require a face-to-face meeting at important junctures in the process. With Workflow 9.1, Workflow will not only run your business processes behind the scenes, but it can also automatically schedule meetings. An iCalendar event can be emailed to each attendee that includes all the meeting details and that can be easily added to most calendar applications. By delegating scheduling to Workflow, it is easy for employees to update their calendars and plan accordingly.

For example, a workflow for project proposals routes the proposals for initial approval. As soon as the approval is complete, the workflow emails a calendar event to the project team. The calendar event schedules the first team meeting for the following Friday morning.

How it works:

In Workflow 9.1, the Create iCalendar File activity creates an .ICS file that will add the calendar event to Outlook Calendars, Google Calendars, Apple Calendars, and more. For a partial list of calendars that work with .ICS files, see this Wikipedia page.

The Create iCalendar File activity has a variety of properties that let you define information about the event such as start and end time, attendees, location, description, and more.

Pair this activity with the Date Token Calculator activity to create dynamic date/time tokens for the Start and End Dates. Then, use an Email activity to attach the resulting .ICS file to an email.

When configuring the Email activity, use the Required Attendees and Optional Attendees tokens in the To: field of the email.

Use the Create iCalendar File activity to send out meeting invites that are compatible with a variety of calendar applications and automatically keep all employees on the same page.

To learn more about new Workflow features, sign up to take the What’s New in Workflow class (BMP 104) at Empower 2014!