20.1 Pop-up Reminders Overview

This section contains the conceptual information you need to understand how pop-up reminders work in Calendar Server software.

This section contains the following topics:

• 20.1.1 Configuration Concepts for Calendar Pop-up Reminders

• 20.1.2 How Pop-up Reminders Work

20.1.1 Configuration Concepts for Calendar Pop-up Reminders

This section describes what must be configured to make pop-up reminders work.

Users can receive Instant Messenger pop-up reminders for upcoming events and tasks on their calendars.

To enable these pop-up reminders, two things must happen:

• The administrator must configure Calendar Server and Instant Messaging Server to allow pop-up notifications.

• The end user must specify email reminders in the Options tab of Communications Express, which sets an alarm in the Event Notification System.

• The end user must enable calendar reminders in Instant Messenger.

With pop-ups enabled, when an impending event or task nears, the alarm set in the Event Notification System causes Calendar Server to send an email notification and Instant Messaging to display a pop-up reminder.

A Calendar Server administrator can choose to configure either email notifications or pop-up reminders or both for end users. For example, to turn email reminders off, set the following parameter in the ics.conf file:

caldb.serveralarms.binary.enable= "no"

20.1.2 How Pop-up Reminders Work

This section describes how pop-up reminders work.

If configured, Instant Messaging pop-up reminders follow this architectural flow:

1. The Instant Messaging JMS subscriber subscribes to Calendar Server events and notifications in the Event Notification Service (ENS).

2. Calendar Server publishes an event or task notification in text/xml or text/calendar format to ENS.

3. The Instant Messaging JMS subscriber receives the calendar event or task notification and then generates a message in text/calendar format.

4. The Instant Messaging server sends the message to the calendar owner, if the end user is online.

5. If the recipient is available, Instant Messenger generates an HTML pop-up reminder on the end user’s desktop based on the message.