Apple prepares to launch Confetti calendar invite system at employees for testing

braytonak said:
If it’s an internal tool then there’s little point in knowing about it. 
That said, maybe this came into existence out of frustration with the Calendar app’s limitations and will eventually be used to improve it.  
I often invite my personal and employer (Microsoft 365 then Google) calendars to events like vacations, or add my spouse’s iCloud calendar for things like doctor visits. Every single time I’m thoroughly disappointed. 
Sometimes invites appear in the Calendar anpp’s inbox view, usually not. A recent invite from my husband came in with completely incorrect time and date. (How do you mess that up without blaming time zones?)

Sometimes you can accept an invite from the email notification, but that’s usually borked. One should not have to know how to use ICS files. 

Random thought, why do day-of reminders for all-day events have to be at 9 AM? 

I have to give Microsoft top rating for their calendar, Google second, and Apple third. Microsoft presents a snippet view of the calendar directly in the email inbox list view, and invites tend to be received and parsed more reliably. 
Apple makes a lot of money on services but they’re don’t focus on making them great. 

I agree that using Apple Mail with other mail apps seems to be less than reliable. I can usually get what I want to work but doing so requires jumping through a few hoops, like using ICS files. As far as default time for all-day events you can change the defaults in Settings/Apps/Calendar. I set all the defaults to None to allow me to set my own start times. What I’ve done to share calendar events with my partner is to create another calendar with a name like “Share with person’s name.” In my case it’s good enough because all of my calendar events are either just for me or shared with another person or persons. Using different calendar color bars allows me to glance at my calendar and see singular events and shared events easily. But yeah, this could get clunky if you have a lot of combinations of invitees.

Of course, like all things Apple, the built-in tools always work best if everyone involved is using Apple stuff. That’s just Apple being Apple. You don’t have to step very far into the Apple ecosystem before coming to that realization. It is what it is. Some of us like it, at least most of the time.

I’ve used a lot of different email and email plus kitchen sink apps over the years. When I started with Outlook I thought it was a breath of fresh compared to Lotus Notes, which I loathed. But Outlook has gotten very bloated and being tethered to Micrsoft’s Exchange server based applications was never what I’d call a pleasant experience for cross platform users. I personally don’t like having email and calendar bound together for personal use, but for corporate environments it seems to work quite well for a lot of users. For personal use the integrated functions are too cumbersome for me. I tried using Outlook for all of my personal email, including iCloud, and it failed miserably. I ended up losing all of my contacts on all of my machines. I must have done something stupid, but I couldn’t trace my path of stupidity back to the root cause so I decided just to stick with Apple Mail and Apple Calendar as separate tools. Thank you Time Machine. Apple Calendar works for my now-much-simpler needs. If I need a shared group calendar I use Google Calendar.

I actually don’t mind using ICS files for certain situations. For example, I can put links to an ICS files on a web site that lets users put a reminder in their calendar for an event where I don’t know who all the invitees will be ahead of time. All users have to do is click on a “Remind Me” link of some sort and it launches their calendar program that knows how to work with ICS files. This seems to work well across many different calendar platforms.