Tech Forum

I'm going to be doing a web based calendar training for our stake in the near future and I'm planning my outline. This training will be focused on member and auxiliary use of the calendar. I thought I would pick the expert brains here to see what points are the most critical that I should have in my training outline outside the basics of how to create a calendar or event, etc? What frustrations are you seeing from the general ward/stake membership in using the calendar? What features of the calendar application are they not using or not using properly? What questions do users always seem to have pertaining to calendar use?

Thank you for your input!

Glad to see this. In my view the calendar has three purposes: To coordinate unit events, schedule the building, and inform the members. If you focus on informing the members, the rest pretty much takes care of itself and nixes some of the "creative" ways people try to get around things.

To me the "don't miss" is the subscriptions and sync. This allows members to get the calendar events of interests with no additional effort on their part. A real advantage if the member is unable to attend Sunday services to get the flyers or hear the announcement.

Some additions: Use of "week view" to see all events at a location. Gather any feedback needed as the stake may need to modify the available rooms to fit the unit's needs.

The difference between events and restrictions. An event tied to the selection of a location in the building makes it so not one else can schedule an activity at the same time and place. A restriction does not hold the building. It merely restricts who can schedule events.

The paradigm shift from a single point scheduler of all things calendar to the new distributed scheduling process where many schedule events and the scheduling program keeps events from scheduling on top of each other. (Do this especially if you are just now fully implementing the new calendar system.)

lajackson wrote:The difference between events and restrictions. An event tied to the selection of a location in the building makes it so not one else can schedule an activity at the same time and place. A restriction does not hold the building. It merely restricts who can schedule events.

The paradigm shift from a single point scheduler of all things calendar to the new distributed scheduling process where many schedule events and the scheduling program keeps events from scheduling on top of each other. (Do this especially if you are just now fully implementing the new calendar system.)

If this was a stake-level training, I'd heartily agree. But given the OP's message, that shouldn't be necessary. It might be good to say that each ward has to input their own activities. The calendar does support having each quorum and auxiliary do it themselves, but that's up to the bishop.

I would suggest that each quorum and auxiliary consider having two calendars - one for the membership and one for the meetings of the leadership. That way the members don't have to see all the leader's meetings.

Also, I might be worth mentioning time zones. If the members travel, their computer may change time zones on them. That in turn will shift all the times in the calendar to reflect the local time zone of the user, not the ward's normal time zone. The user's computer must be set for the proper time zone (not just simply display the correct time) including daylight savings changes, or else the calendar will display wrong.

When a member moves into or out of the ward, they need to log into the subscription page of the calendar to re-set their subscription. This also resets the email notices to the new ward.