How to: Automatically invite the author of an event using the Calendar E-Mail Extension

In this post I will describe how to automatically invite the creator of a SharePoint calendar event to the event using the Calendar E-Mail Extension. The Calendar E-Mail Extension enables you to send meeting requests and updates to attendees. The author of the event does not receive an e-mail invite automatically, but there are 2 possible workarounds to achieve this.

1. Add the current user to the attendees field in the new form

There is an excellent post by Janaka Jeewantha that describes how to set the SharePoint people picker default value to the current user using Javascript.

http://janaka-jeewantha.blogspot.co.at/2011/02/how-to-set-sharepoint-people-picker.html

I added a content editor web part to the new form and placed the script code there. What I needed to change was the parentTagId ‘ctl00_UserField_containerCell’. You can determine the ID by viewing the source of the new form. You should use the id attribute of the attendee field’s td which ends with ‘UserField_containerCell’.

2. Add the author to the attendees field using a SharePoint Designer Workflow

You can also add the author to the list of attendees using a SharePoint Designer Workflow when the item is created.

The second key feature of the Calendar E-Mail Extension is that attendees’ status replies will be handled by the SharePoint calendar and are visible in a communication log. This allows you to check the status (Accepted, Declined, …) of all invited attendees directly in the SharePoint Calendar.

If you also wish to notify the author if an attendee replies, you can add the author to the “Forward Attendee Status Replies To” field using the 2 options described above.