[kronolith] Shared Calendar Thoughts

[Ibarra, Michael]

-----Original Message-----
From: Derek J. Balling [mailto:dredd@megacity.org]
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2002 10:37 AM
To: kronolith@lists.horde.org
Subject: Re: [kronolith] Shared Calendar Thoughts



On Wednesday, August 7, 2002, at 07:42  AM, Ibarra, Michael wrote:
>> My personal thoughts are that shared calendars are better only insofar
>> as they are easier for corporate users to understand. It seems to me
>> that if I roll out Kronolith shared-calendars (when that time is here),
>> shared-events will add to our helpdesk load, shared-calendars will not,
>> because that concept is familiar to them already (Yahoo!Calendars, 
>> etc.)
>
> Yes, and so does paging, IM, browsers, and just about ANY feature that
> you add or support. Your choices are simple, do we hold our users back
> or should help them to progress and make available new, perhaps useful
> tools, that may make their jobs easier. Heck, they may even respect you
> more for it, or at least think that the systems rock.

D >I guess I don't see a lot of added benefit to Shared Events over Shared 
D> Calendars. Perhaps I just don't understand it well enough, but what 
D> makes shared-events something that will just blow my users away? 
D> Convince me.

Invitations to any number of events like parties, meetings, conference
calls, boardroom/meeting room reservations. The way it works under something
like say Outlook is pretty cool, you invite a group of users to a meeting,
you are then taken to a "view" of their schedule, this "view" then either
shows you that time as blocked, open (and if you have perms to see it, what
they are doing during the blocked time). Shared calendars would have to be
a factor in this in that the "view" would be the Shared Calendar portion of
this, and the ability to invite being the Shared Events portion. Imagine
trying to invite 50 people to a meeting and having to manage all of those
replies and decide whether you can still even hold a meeting based on those
replies, i.e. some are busy, out on vacation, whatever. Same holds true for
conference rooms, and just about anything else that can be tagged as a
shedulable
event or object.

Would most users make use of this feature right now? Who knows, but at least
we are not limiting ourselves from the beginning. If I were deciding between
one package and another, the one thing I look for, aside from whether it can
do what I want now, is if it can do what I think I would be doing in 6
months
from now. You had mentioned Yahoo!Calendars in your initial mail, what would
it take for you to completely remove yourself from using that? Would this
feature help? If so, then that should be reason enough.

Best regards,

-mike