Who Is Using A Calendaring Solution On Campus
- College of Education
We have used three different calendar and scheduling applications at the College of Education. We initially used Lotus Organizer across the College for both personal and resource calendars. Organizer was most effective when we used cc:Mail as the message transport for checking free busy times and sending meeting invitations. However, when we migrated our mail to uoregon, we lost the calendar messaging functionality. We also maintained a web engine to provide web access to calendars but the visual format of the web view was a bit awkward and required a lot of scrolling. We eventually decommissioned this service.
Many users have continued to use Organizer for their personal calendars. They like its intuitive interface and the ability to include other people's calendars in their "daybook". They like the planning feature that lets you color code events like conferences, vacation, etc. and easily block out series of days. The product has a variety of printing formats - the trifold and 30 day calendar view being the most popular. It enables you to link to related files or URls and can synchronize with Palm PDAs innately or with Windows PDAs with third party products. However, it is a Windows only product.
Some of us eventually migrated our personal calendars to Microsoft Outlook. Although I preferred the Organizer interface, I felt that I would be more productive if my Calendar system was integrated into my email client so I didn't have to switch in and out of Organizer when I needed to check my schedule to reply to emails. Since we do not run Exchange here, we do not have the capability to share free/busy information or invite people to meetings but for a PIM Outlook meets the basic requirements.
A couple of years ago, Terry Kneen installed a Calcium (http://www.brownbearsw.com/) scheduling system to handle our conference room and resource scheduling needs that had been managed previously with Organizer. It has worked well for scheduling rooms and equipment. However, it lacks the PIM features of contact management, tasks and to-do lists, and notes management. I was told it has a PIM add-in but I did not see any reference to it on their website. For me, task management is an extremely important feature so I doubt I would use the Calcium interface for my own calendar access. However, Calcium can integrate with both Microsot Outlook and Apple iCal so the interface issue may be moot.
- Mary Harrsch, Network & Management Information Systems, College of Education
* Joel Jaeggli
Back in the day (94-97) we ran "now up-to-date" and a central calendar server within microservices.
I've been exploring and experimenting with ical supporting calendar applications, because calandar sources are diverse and extend well beyond the university environment. The problem though from my perspective is where do you calendar of reference live? Mine has for the last couple of years been either a palm device or nokia phone because that's where I do most of the data entry. That calendar can be synced (via isync) to ical on the mac or to outlook via nokia pc suite (palm also had a stand-alone calendar on windows), but they do not support directly subscribing to ical calendars, which means integration with my prefered toolset (mozilla thunderbird) is fairly poor. Desktop calendaring really falls down for me because I have two desktop machines at work (of different platforms) two more at home, and a laptop (and several spares) syncronizing data between all these machines is obviously a problem, currently the only place alarms are generated is on the phone.
* Brad Biehl - Division of Student Affairs
In the mid 90's Student Affairs also ran Now Up-to-Date. Beginning in the mid to late 90's we ran Meeting Maker. We continued using Meeting Maker until version 8.5 (last year). For calendaring purposes, Meeting Maker worked well enough. However, the release of version 8 left out many features that had existed in previous versions. In addition, it was filled with bugs and problems with the UI. Tech support relating to this release was terrible and tended to lead us toward purchasing 8.5, which was not released for 2 years after 8. When 8.5 was finally released, it fixed *some* of the problems and poorly patched some of the problems. We were largely unsatisfied with Meeting Maker. Our experiences after upgrading to 8 were very bad. The administrative problems that existed in the previous version were also not remedied in the newest releases.
As of this last year we have begun deploying Microsoft Exchange. Currently, we have around 200 active accounts with a likely increase to over 500 active users as we finish leaving Meeting Maker. We support PCs(using Outlook 2003), Macs (using Entourage 2004), any system using Evolution, PalmOS devices, PocketPCs and http clients from any platform using the web interface. Our users have been incredibly happy having a central location from which any device they use accesses the same email, calendar, contact, notes, etc…
