Outlook Recurring Appointments

Recurring Tasks and Appointments in Outlook have the same field mappings and behaviours as normal Outlook Tasks & Appointments, with the following additional functionality:

An Outlook Recurring Task is simply a normal Task that creates a new Outlook Task every time the currently open Task is closed. This is handled as expected in Digital-Clay, with a new Digital-Clay Task being created automatically for every new Outlook Task.

Recurring Appointments are more complicated since they are stored as a single recurring pattern, with each occurrence appearing in the Calendar as though it were a normal Appointment, and changes to occurrences are stored internally as exceptions. Digital-Clay handles this as follows:

• For brand new Recurring Appointments, only today's occurrence or the next occurrence after today is added to Digital-Clay.

• If an exception is created in Outlook, or a Recurring Appointment is changed or imported into Digital-Clay that already contains exceptions, all exceptions (up to 10 at a time) are also added to Digital-Clay.

• All changes to occurrence exceptions are synchronized as usual with Digital-Clay.

• A background timer checks Recurring Appointments for current occurrences that have ended, and automatically creates a new Digital-Clay Task for the next occurrence.

• If many occurrences have passed since the last time the Recurring Appointment was checked (e.g. Outlook or ClayStation hasn't been loaded in a long time), Digital-Clay creates up to 10 Tasks for the most recent occurrences until today.

• All occurences with expired end times are automatically closed in Digital-Clay, unless confirmation is required. See Outlook Tasks & Appointments for details.

• If a recurring pattern is changed, Outlook warns that all exceptions will be lost. If this is done, all existing Digital-Clay Tasks associated with the previous pattern will become orphans with status Abandoned and the new recurring pattern will be treated like a new Appointment. The same happens if the recurring pattern is removed completely.

• The background timer that checks for expired Recurring Appointments can be adjusted in ClayStation Tools/Options/Tasks.