Calendaring

1
Calendaring

• Not just a technology decision

2
Calendaring Flavors

• Personal
• Resource Booking/Reservations
• 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 buy-in 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 end-users. 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 buy-in.
• 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 4-6 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.
• Mailman list exchange_at_u.washington.edu