Quorum management of appointment scheduling

An apparatus for managing scheduling of appointments, the apparatus comprising:

• an invitation module configured to send an appointment invitation to each of a plurality of invitees in response to an appointment request from a user, the appointment request indicating a quorum constraint defining a subset of the plurality of invitees required to accept the appointment invitation in order to schedule the appointment;
• a receiving module configured to receive one or more responses to the appointment invitations from the invitees;
• an acceptance module configured to determine that the one or more responses from invitees are responses accepting the appointment invitation;
• a quorum constraint module configured to determine that invitees that accepted the appointment invitations satisfy the quorum constraint in response to determining that the one or more responses from invitees are responses accepting the appointment invitation;
• and
• a scheduling module configured to schedule the appointment with each invitee that sent a response accepting the appointment invitation in response to determining that one or more of the invitees that accepted the appointment invitations satisfy the quorum constraint.

A computer program product, comprising a computer readable storage medium having a computer readable program code embodied therein, the computer readable program code adapted to be executed to implement a method for managing scheduling of appointments, the method comprising:

• scheduling an appointment with each of a plurality of invitees in response to an acceptance from one or more of the invitees, the one or more invitees that have accepted the appointment collectively satisfying a quorum constraint associated with the appointment;
• receiving one or more appointment management requests associated with the appointment from the invitees, the one or more appointment management requests comprising an appointment change;
• providing access to the appointment management requests to each of the appointment invitees;
• determining that a subset of the appointment management requests comprise a common request;
• determining that invitees that sent the common request satisfy the quorum constraint for the appointment;
• and
• implementing the common request in response to invitees that sent the common request satisfying the quorum constraint.