Tech Forum

Can anyone comment on the purpose of the private calendar feature? Any guidelines? I could see, for example, deciding that you don't want the whole ward to see what the youth are doing or some such thing, but what about members creating calendars for personal use, i.e. non-church use?

owenfw wrote:Can anyone comment on the purpose of the private calendar feature? Any guidelines? I could see, for example, deciding that you don't want the whole ward to see what the youth are doing or some such thing, but what about members creating calendars for personal use, i.e. non-church use?

In this post, one of the church developers who works on the calendar officially cautioned against using calendars for personal, non-church use.

Thanks. I kinda thought so.

owenfw wrote:I could see, for example, deciding that you don't want the whole ward to see what the youth are doing or some such thing,

Probably not the best example. "Youth" would be a big group to manage for calender viewers. I think a better example would be Bishopric meetings. I think it's less about secrecy and more about not having members subscribe to it by default.

We set up a private calendar for Bishopric appointmentes originally. The thought process was to be able to schedule disciplinary council meetings and bishopric interviews without the entire ward seeing them. We haven't actually used it yet.

I'd also suggest that we use the same caution with our use of lds.org that we use with the office supplies in the clerks office. Those stamps, paper clips and toner are purchased with donated/consecrated funds, and as such we use them very carefully for their intended purpose. I see the resources of LDS.org, (and the church's wireless) as the same. Somewhere the church is using computer resources to deliver us LDS.org services, and these, too, are purchased and maintained with consecrated funds, and should be used for their intended purposes.

IF we need calendars for "personal use, i.e. non-church use," google will be happy to accommodate anyone, and for free...

davesudweeks wrote:We set up a private calendar for Bishopric appointmentes originally. The thought process was to be able to schedule disciplinary council meetings and bishopric interviews without the entire ward seeing them. We haven't actually used it yet.

We use a private calendar within the Stake Presidency, we schedule interviews, meetings, councils, etc through it. You do need to be careful however as at first I had all my calendar subscriptions syncing with my home calendar which meant my wife and children were able to see all the appointments for each member of the Stake Presidency. I have since set up a separate calendar.

The calendar itself works really well, as all members of the Stake Presidency, including exec secs and clerks, have ipads and download the calendar through LDS Tools and ensures that we all know what each other is doing. It has also made appointment scheduling easier, for us at least.