Transferring calendar items between Outlook and Autotask

In Outlook, Appointments are activities that you schedule in your calendar that do not involve inviting other people or reserving resources.

A Meeting is an appointment you invite people to or reserve resources for. You can create and send meeting requests and reserve resources (a room, computer, or any equipment needed at a meeting) for face-to-face meetings or for online meetings. When you create a meeting, you identify the people to invite and the resources to reserve, and you pick a meeting time. Responses to your meeting request appear in your Inbox. You can also add people to an existing meeting or reschedule a meeting.

An Event is an activity that lasts 24 hours or longer. Examples of an event include a trade show, a vacation, or a seminar. Usually, an event occurs once and can last for one day or several days, but an annual event, such as a birthday or anniversary, occurs yearly on a specific date. Events and annual events do not occupy blocks of time in your calendar; instead, they appear in banners.

Any item type can also be set up as a Recurring item in Outlook.

In Autotask, Appointments are time slots scheduled for non-company related activities such as meetings or personal appointments.

The other Autotask calendar items do not have direct equivalents in Outlook, because they involve additional Autotask entities:

• To-Dos and Notes are used to schedule and track non-billable company or sales activities in the CRM module, and are always related to an Autotask company. Only users with the required CRM security level permissions can create a to-do. A user must have access to the CRM module to be assigned to a to-do.
• Service Calls are a little more complex than Appointments or to-dos, which consist of one item being scheduled. A Service Call is a time reservation on the Calendar or Dispatch Calendar for a specific customer that can contain multiple issues or agenda items, each represented by a task or a ticket.

NOTA  Service calls from Outlook cannot be sent to Autotask; therefore a Service Call must be edited from within Autotask. Refer to Creating new Autotask calendar items from Outlook for more detailed information.

The only recurring calendar items generated in Autotask are recurring Service Calls, which can be created for recurring tickets. Autotask will, however, display recurring appointments transferred from Outlook.

For an in-depth description of Autotask calendar items, refer to Agregar y gestionar elementos de calendario.

To manually pull Autotask calendar items to Outlook do the following:

1. On the Autotask menu in Outlook, go to Autotask group > More > Get Calendar Items.
2. Subject to your configuration settings, Autotask will update Outlook with:

• New calendar items (to-dos or notes, appointments, and service calls) that were created in Autotask and were not previously downloaded to Outlook.
• Changes made in Autotask to existing calendar items that also exist in Outlook (were previously downloaded from Autotask or created in Outlook and sent to Autotask). The data from Autotask (the master database) will always override the information in Outlook.
• Calendar items that were deleted in Autotask and also existed in Outlook will be deleted from Outlook.
• Only Calendar Items scheduled during the user-defined time window (the Get Past Calendar Items and Get Future Calendar Items fields on the Options > Calendar tab) will be added or updated.

NOTA  Recurring appointments created in Outlook and transferred to Autotask are NOT updated. Deletions and changes to these must be made in Outlook.

3. Autotask calendar items are mapped to Outlook as follows:

NOTA  If an existing item is being updated from Autotask, Outlook's Subject, Description, and Start/End Dates and Times will be updated appropriately.

Working in Outlook, you are able to add new calendar items to Autotask without separately logging into Autotask. To add new calendar items from inside Outlook, do the following:

1. In Outlook, go to Autotask > Add to Autotask > More > Appointment (To-Do, Service Call).

2. The Autotask New Appointment, New To-Do, or New Service Call) page will open.
3. Complete all required fields. Refer to Agregar y gestionar citas, Agregar y gestionar tareas pendientes, and Agregar y editar llamadas de servicio.

The new calendar item is added to Autotask, and an automatic Get Calendar Items from Autotask process will be triggered. All Autotask calendar items that match the current filtering settings on the Options > Calendar tab will be updated from Autotask to Outlook.

The field mapping is as follows: