Working with subscribed appointments

You can recognize subscribed appointments in all views (calendar, appointment list, schedule) by the Microsoft or Google logo.

In addition, in the detailed view you will find a section containing information about the subscribed appointment.

In online meetings you will find a "Join meeting" button.

Compared to normal appointments, subscribed appointments are restricted in two important ways:

• Editing of subject, date and time is not possible in portatour®.
• Deleting is not possible in portatour®.

Carry out these processes in Outlook or in the Google Calendar instead. To open the appointment directly there, click on Open in Outlook or Open in Google Calendar in the context menu or in the detailed view of the appointment. Any changes or deletions made there will be transferred to portatour® the next time the calendar subscription is updated.

Customer reference of subscribed appointments

It is important that appointments, which take place at customers, also have a reference to the corresponding customer in portatour®. This ensures that customers are not suggested more than once in schedules or that the last call date of customers is updated correctly.

By default, portatour® attempts to automatically determine the customer reference for subscribed appointments using email addresses. For this purpose, the email addresses of appointments (organizer, participant) are searched for in the email addresses of your portatour® customers. All custom fields with the data type "email address" are taken into account.

If exactly one customer is found in this way, the customer reference is set automatically.

If no customer is found, the appointment is provided with a warning - visually recognizable by a red question mark and the red warning No customer found for customer reference. If more than one customer comes into question, the appointment is also marked with a warning. The customers found are offered for selection.

Use the context menu or the appointment detail page:

• Click on Select customer... to select a customer and create a customer reference manually.
• Click on Remove customer reference to remove the missing customer reference and the warning.

Address of subscribed appointments

When determining the appointment address, portatour® proceeds as follows by default:

1. The address is taken directly from the appointment in Outlook or Google and then geocoded. If the geocoding is not possible exactly, a geocoding warning is added to the appointment.
2. If the address is empty but a customer reference is found, the address of the customer is used as appointment address.
3. If this is also unsuccessful, the appointment will be provided with a geocoding error.
4. If the appointment is marked as an online meeting, the appointment is created without location reference.

Since an exact address is important for route planning, you can change the address yourself, edit and geocode it as you would with normal appointments. However, an address changed in this way is not synchronized back to Outlook or Google. The change is retained in portatour® as long as the appointment address in the original appointment does not change.

Taking appointments into account for route planning

Subscribed appointments are included in the schedule by default. If you do not want this for an appointment because it should not have any influence on your day trip:

1. Click on the relevant appointment.
2. In the context menu or in the appointment details under Actions, click on Exclude appointment from schedule. In the calendar, these appointments are displayed in gray with the corresponding symbol. 
   
3. To schedule the appointment again, click on Consider appointment in schedule.

Updating the appointments from a calendar subscription

The regular import of appointments from calendar subscriptions is fully automatic. If you are actively using portatour® and one hour has passed since the last update, the update is automatically carried out in the background.

If an error occurs, you will receive a red warning in the main menu.

To see when the last update took place, click on the cogwheel in the top right-hand corner of the calendar view. Any errors that occurred during the update will be displayed here.

If necessary, you can start an update manually at any time. To do this, click on Update calendar subscriptions.

Further information

• For step-by-step instructions on how to add the calendar subscription, see Subscribe to Outlook or Google calendar.