Meeting or Appointment?

The Company: Microsoft

The Product: Outlook

The Rude Awakening: You double-click to create a calendar item, send out the invitations, and wait for responses. Then you learn that some recipients cannot respond to the invitation, even though they also use Microsoft Outlook. The Accept, Tentative, and Decline buttons are unavailable (grayed out).

The Design Flaw: The words "meeting" and "appointment" are synonymous in the minds of most people. But Microsoft has decided that there needs to be a distinction. Microsoft initiates an "Appointment" instead of a "Meeting" when you double-click on a time slot in the Calendar.

The major Microsoft difference between the two types of Calendar items is that anyone not on your Exchange Server must receive an invitation to a "Meeting" to be able to send a response. People in your organization are free to send a response to either type of event.

If you want to invite people outside of your company/organization, you must take the longer path of selecting "Plan a Meeting" from the Actions menu or "New Meeting Request" from the right-click menu instead of the more intuitive double-click. The default action for double-clicking on a time slot should be to initiate a MEETING.