📖 user-guide

Meeting Coordination

How BATbern organises the annual partner meetings and sends calendar invites

Last updated: June 13, 2026 Reading time: 9 minutes File size: 13.99 KB

Last Updated: 2026-06-13

Implemented — Epic 8.3 (calendar invites) · Story 10-27 (iCal RSVP tracking)

Overview

BATbern holds two partner meetings per year — typically a Spring meeting tied to the Spring BATbern event and an Autumn meeting tied to the Autumn event. These are working lunches where organizers and partner representatives discuss upcoming events, topics, and the partnership.

The platform automates the calendar invite process: organisers create the meeting record, click Send Invite, and all partner contacts receive a single .ics calendar file containing both the partner lunch and the BATbern event itself.

What Partners Receive

When an organiser sends a meeting invite, all contacts listed on the partner record receive an email with an attached .ics calendar file. The file contains two calendar entries:

Calendar Entry What It Contains
Partner Lunch Date, start/end time, location, agenda (free text)
BATbern Event Full event date, time, venue — so attendees can block the whole day

Partners can open the .ics file with any calendar application (Outlook, Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, etc.) and both events are added automatically.

Example email

Subject: Einladung: BATbern Partner-Meeting + BATbern 57

Dear Partner,

Please find attached a calendar invite for the upcoming
BATbern partner meeting and conference.

Partner Lunch:    15 March 2026, 12:00–14:00
Venue:            Restaurant Schwellenmätteli, Bern
BATbern Event:    15 March 2026, 14:30–19:00

[Attachment: partner-meeting.ics]

Example calendar entries (from the .ics file)

BATbern Partner Meeting (SPRING)
When: Monday, 15 March 2026  12:00–14:00
Where: Restaurant Schwellenmätteli, Bern
Notes: Agenda:
       1. Review of 2025 partnership
       2. Preview of 2026 event topics
       3. Partnership renewal discussion

BATbern 57
When: Monday, 15 March 2026  14:30–19:00
Where: Volkshaus Bern
Notes: BATbern Event — you are registered as a partner

For Organisers — Creating a Meeting

Navigate to Partner Meetings

Go to Partners → Meetings in the organiser navigation, or open a partner’s detail page and click the Meetings tab.

Click “Create Meeting”

The meeting creation form opens.

Fill in the meeting details

Field Required Notes
Linked Event Yes Select from upcoming BATbern events; date auto-fills from the event
Meeting Type Yes Spring or Autumn
Start Time Yes Time of partner lunch (e.g., 12:00)
End Time Yes End of lunch before the main event (e.g., 14:00)
Location No Venue name and/or address (shown in .ics invite if provided)
Agenda No Free text — included in the calendar invite description

The meeting date is automatically set to the linked BATbern event date.

Save the meeting

Click Save to create the meeting record. The invite has not been sent yet at this point.

For Organisers — Sending the Invite

Open the meeting record

Find the meeting in the list (status: invite not sent) and open it.

Review the details

Confirm that the location, agenda, and linked event are correct before sending. Once sent, partners will have these details in their calendars.

Click “Send Calendar Invite”

The system sends the .ics file asynchronously to all contacts on all partner records. Each contact receives the invite at both their primary email AND every additional email they have registered in their profile (Story 10.32) — addresses are deduplicated case-insensitively so a contact who appears in two roles or shares an address across roles gets a single copy per inbox. The API responds with 202 Accepted immediately — the actual email delivery happens in the background (typically within a few seconds).

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  ✅ Invite sending in progress               │
│                                              │
│  Calendar invites are being sent to all     │
│  partner contacts via email.                │
│                                              │
│  The "Invite Sent" timestamp will appear    │
│  once delivery is confirmed.                │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Confirm sent status

The meeting list shows an Invite Sent timestamp once the emails have been dispatched.

For Organisers — Tracking RSVPs

Once an invite has been sent, the platform tracks who has accepted, declined, or marked themselves tentative — directly from the recipients’ own calendar clients. No extra action is needed from partners: when they click Accept or Decline in Outlook, Apple Calendar, Gmail, etc., their calendar client emails an RSVP reply back to BATbern, and the response appears in the meeting detail.

How it works

The calendar invite is sent as a proper RFC 5545 METHOD:REQUEST with one ATTENDEE line per recipient and an ORGANIZER address (replies@batbern.ch) that BATbern monitors. When a recipient responds, their calendar client sends a METHOD:REPLY email to that address; BATbern’s inbound-email pipeline parses it and records the response against the meeting.

  • Each attendee email gets a single tracked response; re-responding (e.g. changing Tentative to Accepted) updates the existing record in place.
  • Responses are matched to the meeting via the invite’s calendar UID, so they attach to the correct meeting automatically.

The Attendee Responses panel

An Attendee Responses section appears in the meeting detail panel once the invite has been sent (it stays hidden before then). It shows a summary and a colour-coded list:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Attendee Responses                                                  │
│  2 Accepted · 1 Declined · 1 Tentative                              │
│                                                                      │
│  🟢 ACCEPTED   alice@partner.com      responded 2 Feb 2026, 09:14   │
│  🟢 ACCEPTED   dan@partner.com        responded 2 Feb 2026, 11:02   │
│  🔴 DECLINED   bob@partner.com        responded 3 Feb 2026, 08:40   │
│  🟡 TENTATIVE  carl@partner.com       responded 3 Feb 2026, 15:21   │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Chip Status Meaning
🟢 ACCEPTED green Attendee accepted the invite in their calendar
🔴 DECLINED red Attendee declined
🟡 TENTATIVE amber Attendee marked the invite as tentative

The panel refreshes automatically when you (re)send the invite. RSVP tracking is organiser-only — partners see their own Accept/Decline buttons in their calendar client but do not see the aggregated response list.

For Organisers — Adding Meeting Notes

After the meeting takes place, organisers can record notes directly on the meeting record:

Open the completed meeting

Navigate to Partners → Meetings and open the past meeting.

Click “Edit” and add notes

The Notes field accepts free text. Common contents:

  • Summary of discussion
  • Action items with owners
  • Follow-up decisions
  • Attendance (who came from each partner)

Save

Notes are saved and visible to all organisers. They are not visible to partners.

ℹ️ Note: Post-meeting notes are organiser-internal only. Partners cannot see meeting notes — they only receive the initial calendar invite.
⚠️ Note ownership: Notes are scoped to their partner company. Attempting to update or delete a note via another partner company's URL returns 404 Not Found.

Meeting List View

The meeting list shows past and upcoming meetings:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Partner Meetings                              [+ Create Meeting]    │
│                                                                      │
│  Upcoming                                                           │
│  ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐   │
│  │  BATbern 57 Partner Lunch — SPRING                         │   │
│  │  15 March 2026  ·  12:00–14:00  ·  Restaurant Schwellen... │   │
│  │  Invite: ✅ Sent on 1 Feb 2026                             │   │
│  │                                  [Edit]  [View Details]    │   │
│  └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘   │
│                                                                      │
│  Past                                                               │
│  ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐   │
│  │  BATbern 56 Partner Lunch — AUTUMN                         │   │
│  │  12 September 2025  ·  12:00–14:00  ·  Hotel Bellevue      │   │
│  │  Invite: ✅ Sent on 20 Aug 2025  ·  Notes: ✅ Added        │   │
│  │                                  [Edit]  [View Details]    │   │
│  └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘   │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Technical Details

The .ics file follows RFC 5545 (iCalendar specification) and uses METHOD:REQUEST so the invite appears as an actionable calendar event in supported email clients. The calendar file contains exactly two VEVENT blocks — the partner lunch and the BATbern event. Times are stored in UTC (converted from Europe/Zurich).

Email delivery uses AWS SES with the .ics file attached as text/calendar; method=REQUEST.

For RSVP tracking (Story 10-27), the partner-lunch VEVENT includes an ORGANIZER:mailto:replies@batbern.ch line plus one ATTENDEE;PARTSTAT=NEEDS-ACTION;RSVP=TRUE:mailto:{email} line per recipient — these are what tell calendar clients to send a reply. Replies arrive as METHOD:REPLY emails at the monitored replies@batbern.ch address, are parsed by the inbound-email pipeline, and are matched back to the meeting by the calendar UID.

Troubleshooting

“A partner says they didn’t receive the invite”

  1. Verify the partner has at least one contact with a valid email address on their partner record
  2. Ask the partner to check their spam folder (calendar invites from unfamiliar senders can be filtered)
  3. If the partner expected the invite at an additional email they registered on their profile, confirm that address is listed under Settings → Account → Additional emails (Story 10.32)
  4. The invite can be resent by editing the meeting and clicking Send Calendar Invite again — partners who already added it to their calendar will see an update

“The agenda in the invite is wrong”

Update the meeting record (edit the Agenda field) and resend the invite. Partners’ calendars will update when they accept the updated invite.

“The meeting date is wrong”

The meeting date is derived from the linked BATbern event. If the event date changed, update the linked event first, then re-save the meeting record and resend the invite.

“A partner accepted but their RSVP isn’t showing”

RSVP tracking depends on the recipient’s calendar client actually sending a reply email back to replies@batbern.ch:

  1. Some clients (or some configurations) accept an invite silently without sending a reply. The response can only be recorded if a METHOD:REPLY is sent.
  2. The reply must come from the same address the invite was addressed to (the one listed as an ATTENDEE). A response sent from a different alias may not match.
  3. Replies are processed asynchronously through the inbound-email pipeline — allow a few minutes after the partner responds, then reopen the meeting detail (the panel refetches on open and on re-send).
  4. If the panel is missing entirely, confirm the invite has actually been sent — the Attendee Responses section only appears once Invite Sent is set.