The following is an example scenario for which I am attempting to find a solution.
Scenario
A conference room is defined as having a seating capacity for 4 people. The conference room has a speaker phone that is intended to be used to conference in employees from remote offices. The remote employees need to receive a meeting invitation so as to block their calendar time and keep them in-the-loop should the meeting need to be cancelled or rescheduled. There are 4 local employees that will be invited to the conference room and 2 remote employees that will be invited to participate by conference call. All offices are using Lotus Notes and the meeting chair is using calendaring to confirm the availability of everyone and the conference room. Everyone and the conference room in this example are available for a given date and time.
Problem
The meeting invitation is created. The conference room with seating capacity for 4 people is selected because there will be 4 local employees participating. All 6 employees are listed as being invited to the meeting. The meeting invitation is sent and an e-mail received by the chair from the scheduler indicates that the conference room is unavailable – due to the quantity of invitees exceeding its seating capacity. I tried to include the remote invitees as optional; however, they really aren’t optional. Regardless, the scheduler still includes them when counting the required seats when determining if the conference room is too small.
What is the solution?
One work-around I thought of is to send the invitation to the local people and include the conference room, then after the meeting note is saved, edit it and add the other invitees. The problem with this approach is every time the meeting needs to be rescheduled (e.g., due to a counter proposal, or other reasons) the remote invitees need to be removed from the invitation and later re-added; thus sending meeting cancellation notices to them even though the meeting was not really cancelled. In general, this work-around can get very complicated very quickly if this meeting is reoccurring and only one meeting needs to be changed.
Thanks for your time in reading and responding to this matter.