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.

Oracle Calendar (formerly CorporateTime) is an on-line calendar service for faculty and staff operated by NACS for campus units. Users can schedule meetings with one another as well as manage calendars on others’ behalf. More information can be found at: http://www.nacs.uci.edu/ct/

Oracle Calendar also accommodates schedules for rooms or equipment. Called resource accounts, the agendas for these items can be shared within a unit or a specific set of people. Resource accounts are available at no cost.

The School of Information and Computer Science is one unit on campus using this feature. It allows ICS faculty and staff to check the availability of conference rooms managed by the ICS Dean’s Office and to request reservations for these rooms.

ICS staff and faculty can check room availability on-line and then send Diane Triantis (dtrianti@uci.edu) an email to reserve a room. ICS staff and faculty who need assistance with the installation and use of Oracle Calendar may contact Janet Salk (jsalk@uci.edu).

Departments who are interested in using Oracle Calendar to schedule shared resources are invited to contact NACS (nacs@uci.edu, x42222).

CorporateTime is an online calendar service for UCI faculty and staff administered by NACS. CorporateTime provides subscribers a common infrastructure for calendar services.

Participating users can easily schedule meetings with one another as well as manage calendars on others’ behalf, while integrating shared resources such as conference rooms, equipment, front desk or lab staffing, and other elements of the workday schedule.

CorporateTime is well suited to supporting University-wide meeting scheduling. It offers a robust server architecture and desktop client software for the Windows, Mac OS and Unix/Motif platforms, as well as access via the Web and PDA synchronization.

There are a number of advantages to using CorporateTime:

• Many campus departments use the CorporateTime service, making it very convenient to schedule meetings across campus.
• You can access your calendar via a Web browser. Whether you’re at a meeting across campus or at a conference in Europe, you can access your calendar wherever you can use a Web browser.
• You can carry a copy of your calendar on a Personal Digital Assistant. Many people now use these devices, principally the Palm and Microsoft Pocket PC platforms.
• You can view and coordinate with the calendars of others, and you can set the level of privacy of your own calendar. You can control who may manage your calendar, and the amount of information about your appointments that is revealed.
• You can notify meeting attendees via e-mail. You can send your invited guests, as well as people not using CorporateTime, all the details on important meetings via e-mail as you schedule the meeting.
• You can access your calendar 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. The CorporateTime server is maintained by NACS around the clock and is only down for maintenance Friday nights from 9 PM – midnight.

More Information: http://www.nacs.uci.edu/ct/

Departments who use CorporateTime: http://www.nacs.uci.edu/ct/orgmap.html