Manipulating calendar invitation where the organizer account has been removed

[PhD]

Howdy

We have a weird case we need to work out how to proceed on.

The scenario is:

We have a location calendar for one of our meeting rooms called MEETINGROOM
We have USER-A
and RECIPIENTS

The situation is:
USER-A invites RECIPIENTS to a recursive meeting in MEETINGROOM location.

Now, USER-A has finished up working for us, and the account has been removed from the system.

And now in each RECIPIENT and MEETINGROOM calendar, the appointment remains, still showing the organiser is USER-A... but, we can now not remove, change, manipulate this meeting at all.

Each recipient and the meetinroom do not have any kind of access to re-own this meeting, or make any changes.

if we try to, say, propose a new time, the request is sent to user-a's address which is no longer valid... or change recipients etc - we cant...

Basically we have had a senior level employee leave, and theres at least 20 recurring appointments that need to be a)removed or b) modified.

If i restore the user account from backup - this then lets me manipulate the appointments and such - but i dont want to have that account live (as it wastes a user license)... and deleting them (from user-a's restored account) and having someone else create a new appointment to replace it - seems unintuitive, as then everyone will have to re-accept the meetings again.

We need (as an admin at least) a way to manipulate ownership of appointments somehow....

Any ideas?

Cheers

[PhD]

Bug 27647 – Ability to assign ownership (ie change organizer) of meetings based on search criteria
this looks pretty close to what im after....

[ewilen]

Yes, I'd love to see this resolved.

Currently the only "official" solution is to have the original organizer cancel the meeting, and someone else send out new invites.

But if you look at the links in my comment in the bug, and also at Bug 64095 – forwarded invite supersedes original, these suggest you might be able to hand-craft a new invitation and send that out, with a new organizer. You'll probably have to use zmlmtpinject from the CLI to send it.

The hand-crafted invite would probably have to be both a .ics attachment and the email itself--if you just enclose a .ics file, that's probably not enough, since it won't have the right MIME-type (text/calendar).

Another strategy (low-tech):

Right-click on the meeting and choose "create a copy". This lets you create a new version of the meeting with you as the organizer.

Drawback: it doesn't cancel or replace the original meeting.

[PhD]

Thanks for the update mate
Yeah its a bit sucky.. looks like we will have to temporarilly restore the user account - send a cancellation request, so everyone gets it, delete the account, then a new organiser can schedule the appointments.

@zimbra devs... is there something like this in the works to be fixed or addressed in a future release?

[BDY35]

A slightly better solution (IMHO !): from USER-A account, transfer the invitation into new organizer calendar (USER-B).
USER-B account will appear as the new organizer of the meeting, "sent-by" USER-A.
USER-B should be able to modify the invitation, which you wanted to do.
So, no deletion and no new meeting, only a move.

[PhD]

Are you saying move it to a calendar of user-b that has been added as a shared Calendar to user-a? are you sure this will work and that user-b can start making changes to it?

Hope that's the case, that would make it a little easier to manage

[BDY35]

Yes, i just made a test and it worked beautifully !
In order to select all meetings, dispay "as list" then "select all objects", "right click" in the selected meetings and "Move" (or Transfer) to the destination folder.

Now, USER-B will appear as the organizer, with USER-A having sent the invitation, but USER-A name will disappear as soon as USER-B will make any modification to a meeting (in this meeting description only).

[BDY35]

Update to my last post : to move the selected objects, there si an icon next to "delete" icon, labelled "move selected item(s)". Use it !