There is currently no easy way to add participants to a Lotus Notes Meeting Invite that is not initiated by you.  You can do one of the following, but they all have downsides:

* Email the meeting organizer.  The meeting organizer would need to see your email, and manually copy and paste your suggested participants into the meeting invite, and then click on send.

* Forward the meeting invite to the additional participants you would like to invite.  The meeting invite is simply forwarded as text and cannot be "accepted" by the recipients.  The recipients would need to create their own Calendar entries.  The meeting organizer is also not informed of these additional participants.  Should the meeting organizer make modifications to the meeting invite, these additional participants would not be informed.

* Delegate the meeting invite to someone else.  This does not take care of the case when you would like to attend the meeting as well. If this idea is implemented, it would make it possible for any meeting participant to invite additional people to the meeting in a very simple way.  The additional participants would receive meeting invites, and the meeting organizer would be notified of the additional participants.

How would it work? How might it be implemented?

In the Lotus Notes Calendar entry, have an additional button for "Suggest More Invitees".  When the button is clicked, the user would be asked to add more invitees to the "to" and "cc" lists, in a similar way that a meeting organizer would go through.  When completed, the following would happen:

1. Meeting invite would be sent to the additional participants.

2. A "meeting update notice" would be sent to the meeting organizer, and that allows him to update his own invitee "to" and "cc" lists. Some meeting organizers may want to restrict the audience of their meeting, and would thus want to disable this "Suggest More Invitees" feature.  As such, we can add a "Prevent suggestion of more invitees" delivery option.

Why should IBM invest in implementing this idea?

This is a very useful Lotus Notes Calendering feature that most IBMers would find useful.  Customers of Lotus Notes would likely find it useful too as long as there is a need to organize big meetings for which the meeting organizer may not have a complete list of meeting participants.  For every meeting invite that needs to be forwarded to additional participants, this feature can save several person-hours, depending on the number of people involved.  It would also make Lotus Notes much more usable and live up to its name of a "collaboration platform".

Internally within IBM, this idea is also posted on ThinkPlace as idea 123680.