Calendar Repair Assistant for Event Synchronization
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Solution Overview
Problem
Calendar events can become out-of-sync between organizers and attendees, leading to missed meetings due to inconsistencies in important properties like time and date, which conventional methods rely on users to maintain manually and often fail to identify.
Innovation Solution
A calendar repair system that compares event properties on a regular basis, using a server to verify and update critical properties across multiple calendars, ensuring consistency and preventing missed meetings by designating critical properties and performing corrective actions.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If users manually maintain their own meeting appointments, then users have control over their calendar, but calendar consistency between organizer and attendees deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary calendar repair system that automatically detects and repairs inconsistencies between organizer and attendee calendars. This mediator compares event properties across calendars and performs corrective actions without requiring direct user intervention, thus maintaining user control while ensuring calendar consistency.
Solution Approach 2:
The system enables self-service by automatically identifying and repairing calendar inconsistencies without requiring user action. The repair process operates autonomously, comparing events across calendars and correcting discrepancies in critical properties like time, date, and location, thereby maintaining consistency while minimizing user burden.
2Reliability
If automated calendar repair is implemented, then calendar consistency improves, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the calendar repair process into distinct functional modules: event comparison, discrepancy detection, and corrective action. This segmentation allows the complex repair system to be broken down into manageable components, each handling specific aspects of calendar synchronization, thereby reducing overall system complexity while maintaining reliability.
Solution Approach 2:
The system focuses on monitoring and repairing specific critical parameters (time, date, location) rather than all event properties. By selectively applying repair operations to only the most important parameters that affect meeting attendance, the system achieves high reliability without requiring complex analysis of every calendar event attribute.
3Reliability
If all event properties are synchronized, then complete consistency is achieved, but processing time increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent prioritizes synchronization of critical parameters (time, date, location) over complete synchronization of all event properties. This selective approach ensures that the most important meeting information remains consistent across calendars while significantly reducing the processing time required for calendar repair operations.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs partial synchronization by focusing only on the essential properties needed for meeting attendance rather than synchronizing all event attributes. This partial action approach achieves sufficient reliability for the core function (preventing missed meetings) without the time cost of complete property-by-property synchronization.
Data Source
AI summary
Calendar repair may be provided. Calendar events, such as appointments and meetings, may be created and copied to a plurality of attendee calendars. A first copy of the event may be compared to a second copy of the event, and an event property of the second event may be updated to match a corresponding event property of the first event.