Appointment request for external contact?

[glenndm]

Hello,

Could somebody please help me with the following:

The company works with external sub-contractors
For each subcontractor I created a local user (fe. joe@local.com), in order to visualize its calendar or, more correctly, my scheduled requests for its services.
To schedule a new job, I add/create an appointment to that calendar.

Now, the problem:
I would like to send that appointment request to the subcontractor external email joe@subcontractor.com.
I tried forwarding the mail from joe@local.com to joe@subcontractor.com.

This works when joe is not the organizer of the appointment.
For example, for a 2man job I would be the organizer and ask joe@local for assistance. Then joe@local receives a request email that is forwarded to the external address.

For a single man job where joe is the sole participant, no mail is sent and hence no forward.
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I tried declaring joe as a resource (a little demeaning I know), but then joe cannot be sole participant of a appointment. Also the external email address poses a problem.

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Any suggestions are welcome. If there's a better way, please educate me
glenn

[ewilen]

I don't have a solution off the top of my head but there may be altogether better ways of accomplishing what you're trying to do.

I assume that subcontractor.com isn't running Zimbra...that would make your life easier. However, is is Joe using Outlook? iCal? How about you?

Basically if you could get Joe to use a mail + calendar combo that supports publishing calendars, then it'd be easy for you to send requests to joe@subcontractor.com, have Joe incorporate your invitations into his calendar, and publish his calendar somewhere that you can look at it.

(You might also get things working if Joe is using Meeting Maker or Google Calendar.)

[glenndm]

Hi Elliot,
I have no idea what the subcontractors are using. I'll try to find out. Publishing calendar will be a next hurdle.
pretty sure none of them is up to that or using zimbra though I advocate zimbra everywhere possible.
I myself use the zimbra webclient exclusively.

I've setup a intermediate method.
while reading my own message, it occurred to me that a dummy local user could act as organizer of the workjob.
External contacts as well as co-workers can then be entered as attendees and received the requests.
the only glitch there is that the contacts must belong to the local address book, not the centralized addressbook. but that's part of another RFE
but, for now, this works and suffices while I search for a more elegant method.

best regards
glenn