Resource scheduling in the beta Calendar

[aebrown]

I am happy to see that the new release of the Calendar on new.lds.org includes resource scheduling. I'll need to play with it when I have more time, but here are some quick observations:

• You need to edit the resources using "Manage Locations and Resources" before they show up. That's a good thing, since the names that show up for buildings initially seem to come from FM Group data, and they are not the names in common usage. Also, the default names contained each building twice, but until you say a resource is available for scheduling, it won't show up anywhere else, so that wasn't really a problem.
• You can choose to schedule a whole building, or break it down into Chapel, Cultural Hall, Kitchen, RS Room, etc. You can even add custom resources to a building (for example, we have a pavilion that could be scheduled separately, or we could even add our data projector to the Stake Center for scheduling).
• Scheduling a resource is included with event scheduling. You just choose the location (and specific resources, if you enabled detailed scheduling). That's very convenient. I wish there were also a way to schedule the building both before and after the event for setup/takedown, but it's nice to have it integrated and I suppose I shouldn't be greedy.
• You can assign whole blocks of time to a ward or the stake, or you can even set times as "Blocked" so that only a building scheduler or administrator can schedule a resource during those times. That will be great for shared buildings where one ward gets the cultural hall on Tuesdays and another gets it on Wednesdays, for example.
• There is the concept of a resource scheduler, who can approve resource schedule requests. I haven't researched just how that works yet.

In any case, it looks like there's a lot of new functionality in this area for us to figure out.