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Setting up public calendars
About the All Calendars group
Like the All Users and All Conferences groups, the All Calendars group is a standard user group that resides in the Groups folder on the administrator’s Desktop. All choices that you make for this group become the defaults for all calendars created on your system. This includes all personal calendars on users’ Desktops, all group calendars and all resource calendars. You may wish to create additional calendar groups to deal specifically with each type of calendar, making your system easier to administer.
About group and resource calendars
Group and resource calendars essentially work like conferences, in that one calendar can be used by groups of users to help them collaborate. In the case of calendars, users will be communicating about scheduling meetings, booking meeting locations, and booking resources for a group of users, instead of engaging in online discussion.
Calendars are very helpful for employees or students working cooperatively on group projects. Group work can be difficult to organize when there are no, or few, face-to-face meetings. Group calendars can go a long way in providing a strong project management tool. Employees Students can use group calendars to book meetings and work sessions, locations, and required resources. Both tasks and timed events are posted and available to all employees with permissions to view these calendars. Furthermore, scheduling conflicts can be resolved immediately at the time of booking.
Employees or students can easily fall behind in daily and weekly assignments . Due to a lack of experience in managing their time, they may not plan their workload effectively. Group calendars provide them with the ability to view important dates and access department/class calendars.
For example, at the beginning of a project or school year, the project leader or teacher can input all due dates, meetings, project timelines, quiz, test and exam dates, etc., as appropriate, in a group calendar. By placing this information in a public calendar in a shared workspace where all those involved can access it allows them to manage their workloads effectively. As well, proper scheduling can eliminate unnecessary surprises. Changes can be updated immediately without users having to wait for the next meeting or class . Also, if there is a scheduling conflict, you can find a solution well in advance.
Using group calendars
As the administrator, you can create group calendars and give users permissions and memberships, or add the calendar to an existing calendar group, which would have associated permissions and memberships.
Users can use group calendars in tandem with shared workspaces for collaboration purposes, or can be given the permission to create shared calendars in any location they have access to.
Using resource/location calendars
A resource or location calendar is a public calendar that represents a specific resource, such as a projector, or a meeting room. A resource calendar is updated when users book the resource as part of creating a calendar event.
When users book meetings or presentations, they can reserve a room and equipment at the same time on the Scheduling tab, in the same way as they invite other participants. However, instead of entering the name on the Participants subtab, enter the resource calendar name on the Resources subtab. The conflict resolution feature works with Resource calendars as well as all other calendars, so users can be sure the resources they are booking are available for the duration of the meeting.
Creating group/resource calendars
To create a group/resource/location calendar:
1 Open the General Conferences folder on the administrator’s Desktop.
2 Open the conference where you want to add a group calendar.
3 Create the calendar and set its permissions as described in Client Help.
If the calendar was created by someone other than you, the calendar will automatically belong to the primary OU of the user who created it. If, as the administrator, you want to create a calendar and have it belong to a specific OU, use FirstClass scripting.
Once the group calendar is created and in place, tell users its purpose and encourage them to use it accordingly to improve collaboration and communication.
When individuals are invited to an event created in the group calendar, the event appears to be "from" the group calendar, not the individual creating the event.
Giving users access to calendars
Each user can have only one personal calendar, which exists on every user's Desktop and can be opened by the owner. If the user is granted the Calendar privilege by group on a Group Privileges form, or personally on the User Information form, the user can schedule events and can invite other users to events.
When given the "Share calendars" privilege on the User Information form or the Group Privileges form, users can create group, resource, and location calendars just as you can. In addition, because it often makes sense to put public calendars inside conferences to which they apply (for example, location calendars for meeting rooms inside a staff conference), users also need the Create subconference permission for conferences inside which they may create public calendars.
Setting calendar permissions
As with conferences, you can create group calendars and either set calendar permissions from scratch or add your calendar to an existing calendar group.
Calendar permissions work much the same way as conference permissions. You can control which groups or individuals can view the calendar and to what detail, who can add tasks and events, and who can modify tasks and events. When setting permissions, consider the following:
• what groups or individuals will have access to the calendar?
• will the calendar be in a conference, or added to users’ Desktops?
• what types of access do you want groups to have (read-only, modify, create, etc.)?
Once you have determined how users will use a calendar, use the Calendar Permissions form to set permissions.
Adding calendar groups
Calendar groups allow you to set default permissions for all calendars that belong to the group. FirstClass comes with one standard calendar group, the All Calendars group.
All calendars of all types belong to the All Calendars group and have that group's permissions applied first. These permissions are overridden by the permissions of any calendar group that you create.
Calendar groups are indicated by this icon:
 To add a calendar group:
1 Open the Groups folder on the administrator's Desktop.
2 Choose Admin > Add > Calendar Group.
3 Type the name you want for this calendar group at "Group name".
4 Close the Calendar Group form.
5 Choose File > Properties (Windows) or Get Info (Mac) with the calendar group selected.
6 Select "Protected" to prevent the calendar group from being deleted by accident.
Allowing users to schedule by period
You can create an extra "Period" field on the standard Calendar Event form that includes a pulldown menu with predefined period choices. Users can schedule Calendar events using these period choices, set for specific start times and duration. If you are not familiar with customizing forms and distributing them to your users, see the FirstClass Designer help under Customization Tools.
In an education environment, you can create a "Period" field, and have multiple predefined choices in the pulldown list called First period, Second period, Lunch period, and so on. You can assign a start time and a duration to each of these choices. For example, First period can start at 8:00 AM with a duration of one hour. When a user picks First period from the pulldown list, the correct values for the start and end times will be automatically inserted: starts at 8:00 AM and ends at 9:00 AM.
In a business environment, your predefined entries in the "Period" field might be Morning shift, Afternoon shift, Night shift, and so on.
Regardless of your industry, you follow the same procedure. To create a "Period" field:
1 Use FirstClass Designer to open a settings file that contains the New Calendar Event Form (161).
2 Open the New Calendar Event form.
3 Unhide the static selection field (field ID 1045).
4 Edit the period selections of field 1045 separated by semicolons.
The values at "List" of each item of the popup must be in the format HHMMHHMM, where the first HHMM are the hours and minutes of the start time and the second HHMM are the hours and minutes of duration.
So, for example, if First period is from 8:00 AM to 9:00AM, and you want the first choice to be None, you would type:
None=0;Period 1=08000100;
5 Save your form changes.
6 Distribute the customized form to your users.
Changing the default cancellation messages
Users who have been invited to an event are notified if the event is cancelled ("This event has been cancelled.") or they have been removed from the list of recipients ("Your participation is no longer required.").
If you want different wording for these messages, use FirstClass Designer to update strings 3 and 5 in resource 1295 of the FCSLang.rez file in your FCServer folder.
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