Know-how
What a contact sees in the calendar is not what lies in the system, and a forwarded invitation carries its contents into an environment you do not control.
“I can simply forward invitations. In my calendar at my other clients it only says ‘busy’, and my contact there cannot even see where the appointment takes place.” You hear this objection from consultants, freelancers and interim managers who work for several clients, and it is not unreasonable, because it is true for what appears on the contact’s screen.
It does, however, answer a different question from the one that matters. What counts is not what your contact sees in the calendar, but what lies in the other company’s system once the invitation has arrived there, and in every calendar system display and storage are two different things.
This article follows the path of a forwarded invitation into another company’s system, shows who can read along there, and explains why an anonymous block is enough for reconciling several calendars. How an invitation is built on the inside is described in our article on the ICS file, here the question is what happens to it afterwards.
The setting “free or busy only” controls what other people see when they look at your calendar or look for a slot with you. It is a setting of the view and works where it was set, namely in the calendar it concerns.
A forward takes a completely different route. The invitation is sent as an email with the complete calendar file attached, it lands in the mailbox of an account at the other company, and as soon as it is accepted or imported there, an entry is created in the calendar of that account that contains subject, description, location and attendees exactly as the file brought them along. That the colleague finally reads only “busy” changes nothing about the fact that more is stored in the system, because the view hides what the storage still contains.
A comparison makes this tangible. An envelope with a window shows only a single line to the outside, the letter inside is still complete, and whoever opens the envelope reads everything.
Which parties have access in a given case depends on the configuration of the company in question, but in a large corporation you have to expect several, because mailboxes and calendars there rarely belong to the individual user alone. Behind the word storage hide several places.
None of these places asks which view you chose for your colleagues. If you delete the entry later, it disappears from the view, but not necessarily from archive and backup.
The setting controls what colleagues see, and that is a legitimate concern, because nobody should learn in the corridor that you are sitting at another client’s on Thursday. It does not control the access of those who are responsible for running the system, and it does not control what happens to the data when the company searches it for legal reasons.
In addition there is a question of loyalty toward the sender of the invitation. The client who invited you wrote the invitation for you and the other attendees and not for a third company, and many contracts say that information about projects and participants is to be treated as confidential. Whether this applies to your contracts is written there and not here, but it is worth looking before the next forward goes out.
What is displayed in the calendar is not what lies in the system.
Calendar Butler
A consultant who works for two companies receives an invitation from client A on Monday evening with the subject “Review pricing strategy product line North” and forwards it to her mailbox at client B, so that nobody there gets the idea of scheduling her for Thursday morning. The example is invented but typical, and the consultant acts sensibly, because she makes sure the appointment appears in both calendars.
In the view of her colleagues at B it says “busy”, and everything seems fine. In the mailbox, however, lies a message that contains the subject, the attendees from A and possibly the dial-in link, and if months later a mailbox at B is searched as part of an audit, this invitation shows up among the hits without anyone ever having looked for it. For client A that would be information about its pricing strategy that ended up in a foreign house, and for the consultant it would be a conversation she would rather not have.
The other calendar merely needs to know that you are unavailable from nine to ten. Start, end and a marking as busy are enough for that, and every further line of the invitation is ballast that only creates risk.
The Calendar Butler works on exactly this principle. It is invited to your appointment like one more attendee, reads the invitation once, takes the date and time from it and sends an anonymized block to your other calendars. Subject, description and attendees of the original appointment do not leave the calendar in which they were created, and the foreign system holds only an entry with start, end and the label “Blocked”. Because the block carries its own identifier, it follows every move and every cancellation of the original.
Who has access to your mailbox and calendar in the company you forward to, how long are messages retained there, and what do your contracts say about the confidentiality of appointments and participants? If you have no answer to one of these questions, the forward is a risk you take without need.
And if you want to know what is in one of your own invitations, save the file, open it with a text editor and ask yourself for every line whether you would have wanted to show it to the other client.
Calendar Butler reserves your appointments in every client calendar and keeps your data protected.
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