Keeping Working Hours and Calendar Entries Up-to-Date

Abstract

Techniques are disclosed for keeping calendars up-to-date, whereby a person's working hours, events, and actual availability are accurately reflected. In response to user-generated input and / or application-generated input, working hours can be updated and calendar events can be added to, deleted from, or changed on the user's calendar. This makes it easy for users to keep calendars (including working hours) up-to-date and helps both people and applications that use calendar data. Profiles are preferably used to specify working hours, and a particular user may have one or more profiles available (including a default profile); the user can then easily select from among these profiles to update the working hours for a date / day, or a range of dates / days. Preferences may be associated with the profiles, providing a convenient way of isolating information that applies only to a particular set of working hours.

Description

RELATED INVENTIONS [0001] The present invention is related to the following commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 6,988,128, titled “Calendar Events and Calendar-Driven Application Technique” (Ser. No. 09 / 670,844); U.S. Pat. No. 6,640,230, titled “Calendar-Driven Application Technique for Preparing Responses to Incoming Events” (Ser. No. 09 / 671,001); U.S. Pat. No. 7,035,865, titled “Calendar-Enhanced Awareness for Instant Messaging Systems and Electronic Status Boards” (Ser. No. 09 / 941,045); U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10 / 245,200 (filed concurrently herewith), titled “Predicting and Adjusting Users' Working Hours and Electronic Calendar Events”; and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10 / 245,174 (filed concurrently herewith), titled “Context Conflict Resolution and Automatic Context Source Maintenance”. The disclosures of these related inventions are hereby incorporated herein by reference.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0002] 1. Field of the Invention [0003] The present invention relates ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0016] An object of the present invention is to provide improved techniques for keeping calendars, including working hours, up-to-date.

[0017] An additional object of the present invention is to provide techniques for programmatically adding, deleting, and / or changing calendar entries to keep a user's calendar up-to-date.

Problems solved by technology

ate. That is, there is no way for a calendar user to specify that for next Monday, his working hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., without setting the working hours to 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. for all

Mondays. This inability to precisely control working hours is a limitation of existing electronic c

Previously-stored data in existing calendar systems may also become corrupted or inaccurate if a user attempts to change his working hours.

Any predictions based on working hours must be reformulated and information derived by analyzing historical calendar data may be incorrect because of the altered working hours.

Existing calendar systems provide no way to indicate that one set of working hours is valid for one date or time frame, but not for the remaining dates or time frames, whether in the past or in the future.

The invalidity that after-the-fact changes to working hours may introduce for historical calendar data, and for analyses that may be performed on that data, is a serious problem.

However, these events are not actually represented on electronic calendars as changes to the calendar owner's working hours, but instead are events scheduled during the working hours.

No existing calendar systems are known that support temporarily lengthening a user's working hours.

If Joe's normal schedule is to arrive in the office at 9 a.m., but on a particular day he arrives at 8 a.m., any accesses to his calendar data during that extra hour will provide incorrect information about Joe's availability unless Joe brings up the calendar software and changes his working hours.

The same problem happens if Joe decides to work late occasionally.

On the other hand, if someone needs to locate Joe for an important business matter or for a personal emergency, the incorrect information can have significant consequences.

There may also be situations where a person does not know in advance what his hours will be on a given day.

Additionally, any calendar-based tools (such as those that derive automated voice mail greetings from the calendar) will also be using incorrect data.

This incorrect status information can lead to false expectations that voice mail or other types of messages left for Joe will be received and responded to that day, when in fact Joe is no longer at work.

A similar problem occurs for events that do not have a predetermined start time.

Therefore, accurate information about the user's status during this period cannot be ascertained by calendar-based applications, and people viewing the user's calendar entries also do not get accurate information.

Another problem with existing calendar systems is that a user's status information may be set in multiple places, where those places are not linked to the calendar.

If the user has to manually make status updates in multiple places, it is not only tedious but also an inefficient use of time and is error prone.

Users will likely miss some of the places that should be revised, either due to accidental oversight or because they choose to spend their time on other things.

As a result, the user's status information will be inaccurate in some systems and inconsistent in general.

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