Recently I came across an inconsistent behavior regarding the Appointments entity in the UI (Unified Interface) compared to the Classic Interface. I asked my best friend Google… uhm I mean… Bing for advice but didn’t find anything to help me so I opened a Microsoft support case about it. This is the response I got:
This is by design behavior currently. The appointment created in UCI doesn’t go through scheduling engine so all the appointments will be created in Open state. There is a feature work planned to enable scheduling engine in UCI, post which the appointments created in UCI will have the same status as there in webclient.
So let’s take a look what the consequences are and how we can work around this.
The Issue
In the classic interface an Appointment Status changes to Scheduled as soon as you hit Save.
Classic Interface
Unified Interface
If you do the same thing in UI the Status remains as Open.
Effects on Appointments in Outlook
The most obvious effect of this is how the Appointments is shown in Outlook. If the Status is “Scheduled” the Appointment will Show as: Busy but if the Status is “Open” it will Show as: Free.
This can easily lead to double bookings and we can’t have that, can we?
The Workaround
The workaround is easy but not very pretty. I create a Real Time Workflow that triggers when an Appointment is created and update the records’ Status to “Busy”.
Short post today! Until next time, stay fresh cheese bags.
Sara Lagerquist 