Calendar applications are irreplaceable for people who are aimed at success in their business and life. These applications allow planning the business time and collaboration with other people, creating reminders for important events, organizing meetings – and this enables you to use your time more efficiently. Moreover, psychologically it’s much more comfortable to work not in the disorganization and chaos, but in the more or less defined and clear conditions.

Lotus Notes provides advanced support for managing your (and even other users') schedule. You can create different types of events and reminders. It's easy, just follow the brief guide below.

1. Open the calendar

To use Lotus Notes Calendar you should first open it. There are 3 ways of opening it:

• in the left toolbar: click the Calendar icon
• in your mail database: click the drop down menu next to the word "mail" in the upper left-hand corner of your window and select "Switch to Calendar"
• in the workspace: click the Calendar tab (available in latter versions of Lotus Notes)

2. Create an event

To create an event, simply click on the "New" button and select an event type:

Another way of scheduling events is to double-click the actual day or time slot on the calendar.

The event form will show up. Depending on the event type you selected, the form will be different. All types of events have the following common fields:

• Subject: the summary of an event. For example "AweSync project meeting"
• Start time: the time when the event is supposed to start
• Location: brief description of a place where the event takes place
• Category: you can use pre-defined and create custom categories to mark your events
• Description: the full description of the event

Other fields are available for different types of events. The important one is Repeat: here you can configure how the event should be repeated. For example, an event can repeat weekly.

For Meetings you can invite other people, select Rooms, Resources and even schedule the online Meeting. You can browse the other people free/busy time in "Find Available Times" tab.

Learn more about creating Lotus Notes Calendar entries in the official documentation

You can modify the events by double-clicking them and changing the field values. You can also move events to different date/time using drag-n-drop in Calendar view.

3. Manage free/busy time

Your personal calendar stores the events you created as well as free/busy time information, which is based on the events.

When you create an event, your free/busy information is changed accordingly. By default, for Meetings, Appointments and All Day Events you'll be marked as busy and for Anniversaries you time will be marked as free. However, you can change this by specifying the corresponding "Mark Available" setting:

You can also set up the notifications so the Lotus Notes will show you the alert and/or send you an email for the upcoming event.

4. View and Customize the calendar

Lotus Notes gives you the wide range of options for viewing and customizing your calendar.

There are the following basic options to browse the calendar:

• Use the calendar control on the left: you can jump to a specific month/week/day
• Use day/week/month/all view: these tabs on the top allow you to switch between different calendar views – you can browse 1 day or a certain week/month, or you can even list all events in your calendar as a standard Lotus Notes view
• User date selector on the right to jump to a certain day in the calendar

You can filter calendar entries by different fields using the “Filter by…” control in the top toolbar.

You can change the way your calendar displays the data by choosing different Formatting options on the right.

You can customize other features of your calendar in Preferences:

Here you can set up parameters of you calendar, for instance:

• Working days
• Default events durations
• Settings for alarm notifications
• Your free/busy time settings
• Colors for events (each type can have a custom color)

Using the above preferences you can make your calendar even more useful!

5. Collaborate using the Lotus Notes Calendar

The Lotus Notes Calendar allows you to plan collaborative work with other people.

First of all, you can invite other people to meetings. When you invite them, you’ll be able to see their free/busy information in the “Find Available Times” section near the Description.

Note that when users receive the notifications about a Meeting, they’ll be able to accept or reject it allowing you to know who’s going to attend it (in Invitee Status tab near the Description). Other advanced options like suggesting a new time for the Meeting is available for the invitees.

Also, you can create a Group Calendar to quickly see if people in the group are free or busy at a certain time. To manage Group Calendars, go to More->View and Create Group Calendars:

From there you’ll be able to create group calendars with your contacts. Note that you’ll be able to see someone else’s free/busy information only if he/she has set up the corresponding availability settings. These settings are located in Preferences->Access & Delegation -> Access to your Schedule.

6. Try other features

In this brief overview we listed only the very basics of the Lotus Notes Calendar. There are other interesting features that we should list here:

• Event Actions: you can reschedule, cancel, confirm events, as well as send different types of notifications to users
• Import Calendar: you can import calendar information from iCal and other files
• Search: you can search the calendar the same way as any other Lotus Notes application

Try it yourself and you will learn more useful features, it’s really easy to learn and use.

Enjoy the benefits of organized life with Lotus Notes Calendar!

See also:

Lotus Notes Calendar official help