Group multiple people can see or setup appointments on a group calendar ... As you implement and find people that don't want to participate, peer pressure ...
Group multiple people can see or setup appointments on a group calendar
Group Scheduling Assistance find available meeting times for individuals to get together often involves sharing free/busy times.
Primary focus is faculty and staff.
3 Group scheduling why?
Meetings are how we do business today but scheduling them is difficult sometimes nearly impossible
Group scheduling is probably the most difficult calendaring flavor since it requires coordination of data among users islands dont work
The more people play the more effective it is
Without significant buyin you will fail no matter what technology you select
4 Barriers to Success
People have varying habits changing them may not be easy
Paper day timers PDAs zillions of devices out there that people own to use currently to help them manager their schedule.
Email and calendar religion is right up there with OS religion in terms of hot button issues for both IT and endusers. You might not be able to find something that makes everyone completely happy.
Many will have legitimate questions or concerns about their privacy
Can outsiders see the details of what I am doing and when?
Can I control myself who can see what?
Many top administrators need sophisticated delegation capabilities they dont manage their schedule on their own.
If these administrators resist using the system you are probably done before you start.
Due to lack of standards biggest payoff is for local workgroup functionality currently limited capabilities for group scheduling beyond the workgroup unless we were to deploy a proprietary system campus wide.
Users need to understand this going in and not think that it will solve every problem but it can also cause frustration among users who want this capability badly and dont understand why we all cant just agree and implement something now
5 Can it work?
Remember that not implementing a calendar solution isnt free
Wasted effort scheduling meeting impacts all
Soattempt to get consensus first and start with gentle persuasion how will this improve their life if they go along?
As you implement and find people that dont want to participate peer pressure becomes a very effective tool
Mandating use from the top may work depending on the culture of your organization. But that top probably isnt you it is your dean or department head that has to do it
Understand in advance that it isnt perfect and you wont have 100 buyin.
But consider mandating some penalty for those that wont play they have to do the scheduling for any meeting they are part of for instance
Standards are no doubt important but if you cant wait for them perhaps you need to move anyway
6 Small Schools Discussion
Group of 10 small schools and colleges at UW
Meet every 46 weeks with IT Directors and of Deans of those schools to talk about how we can better cooperate on a number of IT related issues including calendaring.
Half a dozen schools currently running Microsoft Exchange and happy with it. Several other schools not in our group also run Exchange on campus.
Looking at ways that we can work better together help each other with system administration and support since this is not provided by CC or share our own free/busy times between different Exchange organizations.
Slightly controversial have decided to recommend to our Deans that CC do more to either support Exchange on campus or offer it as an alternative to Oracle Calendar through Nebula to build the base of users.
Minimally would like to work toward better interoperability between Exchange and Oracle Calendar users
From our perspective we arent willing to wait for the perfect open source/standards based solution to arrive someday in the future. We need something now and Exchange works well for us and has for many years.