shared calendars vs sending of invitations

[jwilke]

Hi,

Before using Zimbra, my users where accustomed to sending all appointments to a distribution list called agenda@fqdn. This caused all items to be dispersed to my users, and they accepted what they found interesting.

This resulted in a mosaic of overlapping appointments on any particular work day.

Now that we've started using zimbra, i have created a shared account, with a different calendar for each department, and a few calendars for things like peoples holidays and sick days.

A number of people are happy with this, because it cleans up your personal agenda, and it gives them one single dept. calender they can use.

However lately i have been getting complaints concerning people not being aware of appointments, and not being aware someone is on holiday etc.

This is mostly due to people not looking in the right places, and/or items being placed in the wrong location.

I have explained numerous times how the new system works, and why we are using it, but it looks like people are still having trouble with it.

Does this sound familiar to some of you ? if so what steps did you take to get your users to support multiple calenders ?

In the end it looks like my users simply don't care about clarity, and would rather search through one big pile of appointments rather than having to open a different calendar

[fcash]

Did you share out the various calendars to the users? If not, give that a try. Then they will get a list of calendars on the Calendar tab in the Web UI, and can assign a different colour to each calendar. Events from all the calendars will appear on their calendar, all nicely colour coded. And they can check/uncheck the calendars to view only the info they need at that particular time.

If you aren't using shared calendars, why not?

[jwilke]

Yes I have, right now everyone has a few calendars available, color coded and everything. They know how to enable/disable etc

They just seem to prefer the "old" way of doing things.

[Rich Graves]

I don't think zimbra.com can address your problem. Maybe zimbardo.com?

For the out-of-office problem, we have someone whose job it is to record absences on a shared calendar. They are always entered as all-day events, even if someone will only be out a half day. Absences can always be found at the top of the agenda, in a distinguishing colo(u)r. They don't add to clutter, so there's little incentive to disable that calendar.

Optional public events are more difficult. Something we've considered, but not implemented, is an agenda@fqdn weekly digest containing not actual appointment invites, but hyperlinks to a web site that would inject the appropriate iCal into the user's calendar. No clutter unless the event is accepted, and no more work on the recipient's end than accepting a traditional invite. But a greater burden is put on the sender and the web programmer. One could imagine an agenda@fqdn address that accepted normal invites, posted them to a shared calendar, stripped iCal attachments, and dropped the text part of the message into a queue for a weekly majordomo/listserv/sympa/mailman digest, but that's a lot of code to maintain.