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Oracle Calendar
OIT has been supporting the collaborative appointment management tool “Oracle Calendar” for many years. Users quickly learn how to create appointments, invite colleagues to meetings, and indicate their availability to others. However, Oracle Calendar has a rich set of useful features you might not be aware of. Here are some of them.
Group Agenda
If you need to find a time when a group of people can all meet, the most straightforward way is to choose a time that suits you and use the “Check Conflicts” feature on the event creation dialog to see if everyone else is available. If your colleagues already have a lot of meetings, this kind of hunt for an open spot can be frustrating. You can also select “Suggest Date/Time” from the Tools menu of the dialog, but Oracle Calendar will exclude times held by tentative or low-priority meetings and include hours that may not be part of your colleagues’ work schedules.
Alternatively, you can open “Group Agenda” from the File/Open menu. This allows you to browse the calendars of your colleagues in parallel, one day at a time, and use your own judgment as to priorities in selecting a meeting time.
Color Coding
By default, Oracle will color meetings you plan to attend in green, meetings you have declined in red, and meetings that are undecided in blue. In addition, paler versions of these three colors are used for meetings with a tentative status. Alternatively, you can elect to have your calendar colored according to meeting priority (red for highest and blue for lowest) or even according to whether you created the meeting and control it (in yellow), or have been invited by another user and don’t control it (in blue.) Finally, you can set the colors for any of these views in a way that is intuitive to you. You can access this feature under “Tools/Options…” then under “Agenda/Colors”.
Search
There are three search features available to you in Oracle Calendar. One allows you to search your own calendar for events matching diverse criteria. Another allows you to search the directory (the database of Oracle Calendar users and resources.) A third allows you to quickly look up where a colleague is (say, at a staff meeting.) All of these options can be found under the “Tools” menu. Searching your own agenda can also be accessed with ctrl+F or by clicking on the binoculars icon.
Include Non-Subscribers
To a limited extent, you can invite and communicate via email with people who do not use Oracle Calendar. Simply put an email address in the place of an Oracle Calendar user name, then agree to send email upon creation or change of a meeting’s status. Oracle Calendar will coordinate with the non-subscriber using the email address you supply.
If you would like more information about Oracle Calendar, consider attending one of OIT’s quarterly classes, accessible through TED.