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Andrew Laurence

Migrating Oracle Calendar Data

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OIT will be copying calendar data from Oracle Calendar to Exchange Calendar the weekend of August 4-5, immediately before Exchange Calendar becomes the production calendar on Monday August 6.

Oracle Calendar will become unavailable after close of business on Friday August 3, and Exchange Calendar will be on line at 4am on Monday August 6.

All calendar events, for all Oracle Calendar users and all Oracle Calendar resources, will be transferred.  There are some differences in how calendar events are defined in the two systems:

  • Exchange differentiates between an event that includes only you (an “Appointment”) and an event that includes others (a “Meeting”).
  • Daily Events and Daily Notes in Oracle Calendar will become All-Day Events in Exchange.  Availability will be set as “Free” to avoid scheduling conflicts.
  • Exchange deletes events that you have declined, so Oracle Calendar events you indicated you would not attend will not appear in Exchange.
  • Repeating meetings in Oracle Calendar will be transferred as repeating meetings only if the repetition follows a very simple pattern.  Other repeating meetings will be transferred as a group of independent events.

More information can be found on the Calendar migration web page.

Advanced Oracle Calendar Tips

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Oracle Calendar

Oracle Calendar tool bar

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.

Secure Instant Messaging

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chat logo

NACS has introduced a new component of our communication and collaboration services: Instant Messaging (IM).

This service allows real-time communication between two or more people.  You can type brief messages back and forth, ask and answer quick questions, share links, and transfer files. In addition to person-to-person communications, it can be used to host a group “chat room”, to assist help desk or reception activities, or for contact between faculty and students.

As this service is designed for and operated at UC Irvine, it has many advantages over commercial IM services:

  • UCInetID Identification — Your instant messaging ID is the same as your campus login: UCInetID@uci.edu. With the UCInetID system you always know with whom you’re speaking; no need to guess or verify whether an instant messaging handle actually belongs to your coworker.
  • Spam-Free — NACS Instant Messaging is not accessible by commercial instant messaging systems. In addition, you must authorize senders before they may send messages to you.
  • Security — All transmissions are encrypted using SSL/TLS.

NACS offers documentation for selected instant messaging clients for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

For additional information and connection instructions, please see http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/im/

NACS Exchange Services

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For most departments, email needs can be met with NACS Mailbox Services which is provided to the campus at no charge.

NACS offers Exchange services to departments which require an integrated Microsoft environment, including email, calendar, and group communications. Clients have access to the service from anywhere on the Internet. This service is intended as a lower-cost alternative to local email management for departments that already use Exchange.

NACS is currently supporting an Exchange server for the Paul Merage School of Business and several other departments including the School of Law . The Exchange Service provides support for Outlook, Outlook Web Access, Outlook Mobile Access, Exchange ActiveSync, Microsoft Entourage, and standard-based POP/IMAP/SMTP clients.  For users who often use multiple computers, Exchange has a web interface.

The servers used for the Exchange platform are hosted in the Academic Data Center . NACS manages the software, system administration, server hardware, storage management, upgrades, backups, and performance tuning for the Exchange servers. NACS also has a 24/7 monitoring and response group to make sure service is restored quickly in the event of an interruption.  NACS would be happy to meet with interested department managers to assess whether this service matches department needs.  Contact us at nacs@uci.edu .