Throughout everyone’s business day we are constantly handling a flow of incoming requests. Whether those requests are coming from family for things to do at home or requests for business actions and to-do’s to take care of they all require us to manage a busy schedule and to ensure that our daily tasks are completed.

End users and administrators learn to manage the personal data that is created while running Outlook. Such data includes: Email, Calendar, Tools, Contacts and Tasks.

But for administrators, knowing how Outlook is managing that data can help when data cannot be accessed for some unknown reason or when their end users want to disable certain management features of Outlook. For instance, suppose an end user would like the meeting requests to not be shown as tentative when they are displayed in the Calendar.

It turns out that a part of the Outlook code implementation is some code known as a “sniffer” that is designed to be a Big Brother, so to speak, that scrutinizes incoming emails and also Calendar events for specific items of interest.  Once these items have been identified then code kicks in and action is taken against those items. Such actions can include:

• Scheduling meetings and adding invitations to your calendar
• Update meetings with any new changes that occur
• Update your tasks
• Perform message recalls
• Update vote responses

Think of the sniffer process as an administrative assistant. Someone sends you or your end user a meeting invitation. The sniffer identifies the invite and then appropriately – as long as it is permitted to do so – blocks out the day and time allotted for the meeting in your calendar. Let’s say you receive a calendar invite for Tuesday of next week for a meeting between 10am to 11am. You open the invite and proceed to read it. In the background, the sniffer is automatically processing the information and scheduling the meeting in your calendar. No action is necessary on your part to either accept or tentatively accept the invite or to decline the invite for it to show up in your calendar.

Note that the end user has to either open the item or view it in the preview pane before the sniffer can process the information contained in the invite. The sniffer doesn’t automatically this information indiscriminately.

This is a very convenient method for you and your end users to keep their calendars updated without the need to manually accept or manually tentatively accept the invites. This is because the sniffer can process these invites but not respond back to the original sender’s of the invites with any acknowledgements. This allows for administrators and end users to proceed through their work days knowing that their calendars are constantly being updated. Then, at a time more convenient for them they can sit down and take one look at their calendar and accept or reject those invites in one sitting at one time.

There are a couple things to be aware of when working with “sniffed” meetings in Outlook. One is that your end users should not move their incoming meeting invites from their inbox without first viewing them as this will prevent the sniffer from adding those items to their calendar. The same functionality applies to incoming meeting invites that are moved by rules that are created by administrators or end users. Unviewed moved meeting requests will not be processed by the sniffer.

However, there is an advantage to moving all unread or un-previewed invites to a specific folder and that is that the recipient can store them all in one place for later viewing. Some users wish to manage their invites in this manner and make it part of their daily routine. If this is the desire of one or more of your end users then an administrator can take the following steps to create a rule which will move meeting invitations out of an Inbox and into a specific folder.

1. Create a folder. Turn off the reading pane.
2. Select Inbox, go to Tools, then Rules and then Alerts.
3. Click New Rule.
4. Click on “Check messages when they arrive”. Hit Next.
5. On the Select conditions page, select “which is a meeting invitation or update.”
6. On the next page, select “move it to the specific folder”. Specify the newly created folder.
7. Click Finish and you’re done.

Any new incoming meeting invitations will now go to this newly created folder. Now your newly created folder will function as if it were the recipient’s inbox. That is, reading or previewing meeting invitations in this folder will automatically get updated in the calendar by the sniffer.

Something else to be aware of is that instead of forwarding meeting invites onto others not on the list, the recipient should request that other potential recipients be added to the attendee list.  Otherwise a meeting might be accepted by someone who was not originally on the first meeting invitation notice.

All in all, having a sniffer running can help to increase any users’ productivity.