blackjf1 wrote:My name is Jed Black and I am a church service missionary. I have been asked to become an expert on calendar and have been doing so for most of 2013 . As part of this assignment I am over a team of church service missionaries asked to update the calendar help and also come with training for members on how to use calendar.
This is great news. It's been frustrating that the documentation for Calendar (and for the other tools on LDS.org, for that matter) has been neglected for so long. The fact that it is out of date makes it confusing for users, and less useful as a place we on the forum can direct users for information. So I'm very happy to hear that someone has been assigned to update this.
blackjf1 wrote:One of our major concerns is related to the role of building schedulers. The current help states that building schedulers cannot schedule events. This is totally false. The only reason Building schedulers cannot schedule events is because no one has added them as editors to a calendar.
Actually, it's totally true. It's just as true as the statement "the Nursery Leader cannot schedule events". Being given the assignment of building scheduler confers absolutely no permissions to schedule an event, any more than being given the calling of Nursery Leader does.
Now, you do have a point that the building scheduler can be given permissions to edit one or more calendars, and that may make sense in some cases. But it certainly runs the risk of perpetuating the myth that people need to ask the building scheduler to schedule buildings for them. The vast majority of events should be scheduled by someone else, and it's quite reasonable for the building scheduler to never schedule a single event.
If you're going to update the documentation, please make sure that you keep a very clear distinction between what permissions are conferred upon a person when a stake administrator assigns them the role of Building Scheduler in the Calendar, and what other additional permissions
might be assigned to such a person, completely independent of that particular assignment of Building Scheduler.
blackjf1 wrote:The Building scheduler for a ward should be added, by name, to the ward activities calendar.
The term "Building scheduler for a ward" is quite confusing. A Building Scheduler is an assigned role in the Calendar that is associated with a
Location, not a ward. If someone has been asked to help schedule events for a ward, they should be an editor for the ward activities calendar (and perhaps other calendars as well), but that has nothing to do with the Building Scheduler role.
I suppose that for the case of a building that houses only one ward, it's possible that the bishop may choose to designate someone to be a "building scheduler." But in such a case, there's a strong argument to be made that such a person would not need to have the Building Scheduler role at all -- everything that needs to be done can be done by using events. The only challenge that might arise is if people from other wards try to schedule that building for their ward functions (in which case some Restrictions might be helpful). But if that's not a problem, you really could dispense with having a building scheduler.
blackjf1 wrote:The stake should create a building calendar for each of the shared buildings in the stake and make the building schedulers editors on these building calendars. Then building schedulers can schedule building events such as weddings, funerals, etc and everyone can see these events.
This is one possible approach, but I certainly would never use the word "should" for an optional approach. I can see how it could certainly be an option that could work for some stakes, but by no means is it the only approach. I personally don't think it should even be the recommended approach.
A different model, which we have used very successfully in our stake, is to avoid having the Building Scheduler schedule any events at all. Instead, each ward has a "Calendar Coordinator" who schedules events for situations where it may not be best to have an existing calendar coordinator put the event on a standard calendar, including weddings, funerals for people not connected to the ward, etc. (funerals for ward members should be put on a public ward calendar, of course). There is absolutely no reason why such events would need to be added by a "Building Scheduler."
One major problem I see with having the Building Scheduler schedule events is that he or she does not have access to each ward's calendar. Although some events the scheduler may be asked to add to the calendar do indeed belong on a private calendar, it's almost certain that a building scheduler will be asked to schedule events that really do belong on a public ward calendar. Then the scheduler may be tempted to put such an event on the calendar that he or she does have access to in order to book the building, but this is a poor choice, since it will result in the event being invisible to ward members.
blackjf1 wrote:It is important to remember that once building schedulers can schedule events this solves many of the problems where conflicts arise because the schedulers were using restrictions rather than reservations. The new help documents and member training will reflect this.
I agree that we should do everything we can to discourage anyone from using restrictions in place of events (I think that's what you meant to say when you used the word "reservations," which is the old term for what is now a "restriction"). There are many problems caused by using a restriction in a misguided effort to book the building for an event.
But as I've described above, there are other ways to solve this problem than turning building schedulers into calendar editors. I would hope that the new help documents and training will reflect this.