When you create a meeting in Outlook, you actually create a meeting request. The request is sent out by e-mail to the prospective meeting participants, who respond by accepting or declining the meeting request or by proposing a new time.
A meeting requires three basic elements: someone to organize it, people to come, and a place to meet. Outlook can help pull these pieces together quickly and efficiently.
The people involved have the following distinct titles and roles:
- Meeting Organizer: Whoever sets up a meeting becomes the meeting organizer. The organizer is the only person who can change the meeting details once it has been set up. Also, keep in mind that you can never assign a new organizer to an existing meeting. Once you're the organizer, you're always the organizer.
- Attendee: Anyone who is invited to the meeting is considered an attendee. There are two categories of attendee: required and optional. Once an attendee is added to the attendee list, that person will always be considered an attendee for the meeting. Even if an attendee declines a meeting, he or she is still considered an attendee.
- Location/Resource: The place the meeting will occur is the location, sometimes referred to as resource. How you specify a location (or resource) for the meeting will depend on how things are set up at your organization. We'll talk more about this in the Location, location, location section later on in this course.
In Outlook, each person in the meeting is represented by an icon that you can see in the Scheduling tab of a meeting request.