That title might sound kind of silly if you think you already know how to invite people to do stuff. You just call and ask them, right? Or text, or email? There’s tons of ways to invite people to do stuff. And then they have to look at their schedule, see if they’re available, reply to you, confirm the information, go back to their calendar, manually add it by typing in all the info… it’s kind of a pain sometimes, right? Well, there’s also a nice little feature in Windows Mobile where you can send “Meeting Requests” to people. When the recipients receive the Meeting Request in their email, all they have to do is click the “Accept” button and the meeting will automatically load into their calendar (depending on what type of email client they are using).

First off, open the Calendar application on your Windows Phone. Then go to Menu>Tools>Options > “Appointments” tab. At the bottom is a “Send meeting requests via” drop-down menu. Choose the email account you want to use for sending the meeting requests. Click OK to close the dialog.

Next, create a new appointment and fill in all of the important information such as date, time, location, title, etc. Also add a little message or description to the Notes field. Then select the “Attendees” field. This will allow you to select Required and Optional attendees from your device address book or company address book if you’re connected to Exchange. Select any number of people that you would like to invite to the event you are creating. When finished, tap “Done”. If you have the “Send/receive when I click Send” option turned on, the meeting request will be sent right away.

Now, if your recipients use an email program that supports meeting requests, the appointment will appear in their inbox and when opened, it will show a number of extra buttons like Accept, Decline, Tentative, or “Propose New Time”. If the recipient presses any of those buttons it will send a notification back to you and update your calendar appointment’s Attendee list accordingly. It will also automatically add the appointment to the recipient’s calendar. Also notice in the screenshots below, that if the meeting requested conflicts with something else already on my calendar, it tells me right away.

This works best with Windows Mobile, Outlook, Entourage, Outlook Web Access for Exchange, and Blackberries. It does not work so well with Windows Live Mail Desktop or Hotmail, however it does kind of work with the web based Gmail Calendar. EDIT: Gmail Calendar will support meeting requests sent from Outlook 2007, but not from Windows Mobile.