View many calendars at once...

[ThomasB]

We've migrated successfully from Outlook to Zimbra 6.0.3 NE.

Most users are happy, and things are running smoothly. However, a few questions remain open. The most important beeing a request from the secretaries on how to view many calendars at once.

We have about 30 shared calendars, one for each employee. The secretaries need to see at-a-glance who's free at a given time. Say, someone calls in and they need to set up a meeting, and they need to know who's available tomorrow after 2PM.

The secretaries have access to see all calendars, but browsing through 30 of them is not a good option. And even though calendars can overlap in the calendar view, this works well for maybe 3-5 calendars at a time but not 30.

Any ideas on how to solve? Best would probably be something of a list view, with every user displayed on a new line, with time displayed horizontally.

[Dirk]

Did Outlook handle this to your satisfaction previously? If so, how, because I cant work out how that would work.

It may be possible to use the free/busy information to meet your needs, perhaps by trying to set an appointment in a calendar and inviting everyone to it to see their availablity.

Or if this is needed for just some people and it was ok in Outlook, then continue to use Outlook as the client?

[ThomasB]

Originally Posted by Dirk

Did Outlook handle this to your satisfaction previously? If so, how, because I cant work out how that would work.

It may be possible to use the free/busy information to meet your needs, perhaps by trying to set an appointment in a calendar and inviting everyone to it to see their availablity.

No, this didn't work very well in Outlook either - but our hopes were for Zimbra to be better

The one good thing in Outlook, was that you could see for instance 10 calendars at a time - and it would autoassign different colours to them. In Zimbra, as soon as you need to see two calendars that's been assigned the same colour - you can't really tell who "owns" the appointment without hovering over it.

Free/busy seems a good alternative approach if (and only if) we could get it to show the appointment text as well as the fact that the employee is busy at a given time. I suppose this might be where things get difficult?

[Lynner]

What about the schedule tab next to month in the view section. That allows you to view multiple calendars side by side. Not sure if it is there in 6.0.3 or not but its there in 5.0.18