How Event Attendees Sync with Einstein Activity Capture

When Attendees Sync

Event attendee details sync when:

• The event organizer is a Salesforce user who is set up to sync events with Einstein Activity Capture.
• The event attendee is a Salesforce user, contact, or lead.

For example, when event organizers create events in Salesforce, they can invite attendees who are Salesforce users, contacts, or leads. The attendee field syncs. Attendees who don’t match to a Salesforce record are external attendees and must be invited to events from organizers’ external Microsoft or Google calendars. In these cases, the attendee field doesn’t sync to Salesforce, because nothing in Salesforce is a match.

Einstein Activity Capture syncs up to 50 attendees per event.

Important

Chatter Free users can’t be attendees on events. The Chatter Free license is for users who don’t have Salesforce licenses but must have access to Chatter. These users can access standard Chatter items such as people, profiles, groups, and files, but they can’t, for security reasons, access any Salesforce objects or data.

How Events Sync for Organizers and Attendees

In Salesforce, event organizers and attendees experience the same events differently.

• Events sync according to the event organizer’s sync direction. Therefore, it’s best for admins to set up event sync for whole teams, not individuals. Otherwise, when an event organizer who isn’t set up to sync events invites an attendee who is set up to sync events, the attendee experiences unexpected sync behavior. For example, a meeting organizer creates an event in Exchange or Google but isn’t configured to sync events inbound. The organizer invites a user as an attendee of their event. The attendee gets a standalone version of the event on the calendar.
• An event organizer can see and edit any event field. Any change an organizer makes to the event is visible to attendees.
• If an event organizer deletes the event from an attendee’s Microsoft calendar, the counterpart isn’t deleted in the attendee’s Salesforce calendar.
• An attendee can see event details, edit the event reminder, and mark the event as private.
• If an attendee deletes the event from their Salesforce calendar, the event is removed only from the attendee’s Salesforce calendar. The attendee’s name is saved on the event’s Created By and Last Updated By fields.

How Events Sync When the Organizer Isn’t in a Syncing Configuration

If an event organizer isn’t set up to sync events and attendees are set up to sync events, the attendees experience unexpected sync behavior.

• When the event organizer creates an event in Salesforce, syncing attendees see a standalone version of the event on their Salesforce calendar. The event doesn’t sync from Salesforce to the attendees’ external calendars.
• When the event organizer creates an event in their external calendar, the event syncs from the external calendar to attendees’ Salesforce calendars. In Salesforce, each attendee is the organizer of the event and other attendees aren’t displayed. Attendees can edit event fields, but those edits don’t sync to their external calendar. If the organizer updates the event from the external calendar, the organizer’s edits override the attendee’s and sync to Salesforce. That way, the attendee sees the latest meeting details.

What Happens When the Event Organizer Is Added to a Configuration with Event Syncing

• When an event organizer is set up to sync, a new syncing event is created. The event organizer sees the new syncing event. To prevent duplicates, attendees with a standalone version of the event don't see the syncing event. If an organizer adds new attendees to the new syncing event, attendees with a standalone event see duplicates. All meeting participants are visible on the external calendar event.
• Attendees sometimes see duplicates in Salesforce after admins reset sync for event organizers and attendees.

How Invitations Are Sent to Attendees

For events created in Lightning Experience or Salesforce mobile app, event invitations and cancellations are emailed to attendees from your email application. For events created in Salesforce Classic, Salesforce sends invitations and cancellations.

Attendee responses to event invitations don’t sync from Salesforce to your external calendar. Attendees can’t respond to event invitations in Lightning Experience and the Salesforce mobile app. To avoid overwriting attendance statuses in Salesforce Classic, see How to Respond to Event Invitations from Your Microsoft or Google Calendar.

How Event Attendees Are Matched as Invitees to Salesforce Records

Attendee email addresses on inbound synced events are checked against and matched to user, contact, and lead records, in that order. On user and contact records, field-level encryption affects whether standard or custom email address fields are checked.

If field-level encryption is enabled for a standard email address field on user or contact records, standard and custom email fields are checked for matches with an attendee.

If encryption is disabled for a standard email address field, only standard email fields are checked for matches on user and contact records. Custom email fields aren't checked.

On lead records, standard and custom fields are always included in the check for attendee email matches.

What Happens When Attendees Are Removed from a Syncing Event

Attendees can be unintentionally removed from syncing events in these scenarios.

• The organizer is set up for one of these sync directions: Both Ways, Exchange to Salesforce, or Google to Salesforce and a user changes or removes the matching email address from the Salesforce user account, contact, or lead.
• A Salesforce user was configured with a non-primary (alias) email address.

However, original attendees can stay invited to syncing events despite having been intentionally removed when both of these conditions are true.

• The organizer replaces the email address on the Microsoft or Google event with an address that doesn’t match the original Salesforce user, contact, or lead.
• A user adds an email address on the Microsoft or Google event, and the email address matches a record that has an original attendee’s email address in a custom email field.