How to Avoid Disappearing meetings
Outlook is an amazingly flexible program. It has a plethora of features. Therein lies its downfall (and yours). If you work in a big company, you’ll find that once a new version has been in place for about a year it will get increasingly buggy. The situation will not improve. Meetings will disappear, reschedule themselves for one a.m,,turn up in a new language and remove the conference room. They’ll do circus tricks and Houdiniesque machinations – anything to make you look a fool. These are some best practices that will help you keep from annoying it:
1) Always mark your meeting notices “read” or open them before filing or discarding them. Never file them automatically with rules. NOTE: When you permanently delete a meeting notice, the meeting may disappear from the calendar.
The same is true for acceptances if you want a true reading of who is planning to attend a meeting you initiate.
2) Never accept or decline meetings from a Blackberry unless there’s absolutely no way to avoid it. Doing so causes the titles of meetings to be “greeked” and meetings to turn up at the wrong times or disappear altogether.
3) Check periodically to be certain you aren’t in cache mode. From your inbox:
Choose Tools/Email Accounts
Click “Next”
Click “Change”
Under the first box you’ll see a check box labeled “cache mode.” Uncheck it. It will reset itself periodically, so check every month or so.
4) Set your free/busy options to show 6 months. This won’t keep meetings from disappearing, but it will help keep people from scheduling over existing meetings. Again from the inbox:
Choose Tools/Options
Calendar Options
Free/Busy Options (bottom left)
Enter “6” in the first box
5) If you set up a recurring meeting, it will serve you well to include an end date. Those with end dates are less likely to experience errors than open-ended series. Six months is a good time period; a year is as long as you should go. If you start to have a lot of problems with the meeting, the safe solution is to end it and re-create the invitation. Of course, this is a personal decision – any problems will mostly affect *you*. There is no gain in refusing to accept invitations without an end date.
Meetings will still occasionally disappear, but following these guidelines will reduce the instances. If your manager is giving you a hard time, send him/her to this page – s/he may be the problem!
