Shared public calendar showing all users' appointments

[Techboy]

I've been asked to set up a calendar which:
- is viewable by all staff
- can be edited by admin staff only
- shows the appointments of all Zimbra calendar users

So far, my idea is to set up a new Zimbra account for the calendar and make the admin team delegates, then have them manually accept meeting invitations from every user, and ask staff to make the shared calendar user an attendee at all meetings. Is there a better way to do this?

The idea is to have one central calendar where a member of staff can see who is out each day, and to see when convenient times for meetings are. I know this is a roundabout way of doing things, but the staff here are stuck in their ways and complain to line management about the most trivial of changes.

Many thanks!

[jonallport]

That's exactly the issue I came up against.

Initially I had a shared calendar which all users could subscribe to. However, this got very confusing very quickly as people didn't know whether to add their appointments into their personal calendar, the shared one or both. Also it had that added problem that any mobile device users (like me) who subscribed to this shared calendar would be getting the reminders for other people's events at all hours of that day or night.

The way I have it setup now is with a 'resource' called 'Staff Whereabouts'. The resource is unlimited and so will 'attend' any and all meetings it is invited to, 'whereabouts' shares its calendar read-only with all users who can subscribe to it if they wish (so it's shown in their ZCS calendar) or just view it as a web-page (embedded in the Intranet site). You could just add write privileges for your admin staff to suit your needs.

It seems to work better so far...

...and I haven't been woken up at 3am to be told there's a sales meeting in some other timezone!

Hope that helps.

[Techboy]

You are my favourite person. Works wonderfully!

Thanks a lot!