K-12 best calendar practices

[dmartens]

We are a private K-12 institution. I hope to install Zimbra this summer and wondered if anyone had suggestions for setting up shared calendaring for our staff, training our staff, etc. In our current calendar we have a large number of shared calendar categories covering the gamut of sports, fine arts, clubs and activities, all school events, etc. How have people organized all these different events into a manageable system of viewing shared calendars?

As I consider this I have many questions. Here are a few:

• Are there ways of creating categories of calendars & allowing users the option of subscribing to an entire category, or individual calendars with in a category?

• Is there a way to turn off internal notes for events that are published in a publicly shared calendar?

• Must users manually subscribe to shared calendars they have access to, or is there an automated way of giving access?

• Should these shared calendars be shared from an active account (i.e. a secretary, or our Athletic Director) or should users be set up exclusively for sharing calendars?


We will be brainstorming solutions here over the next few weeks, prior to our implementation. Any suggestions would be welcome.

[r8escjohn]

We just started using a Zimbra Shared 'General Office' Calendar in a K-12 Enviroment and am intrested in seeing what answers you get on this thread, especially the first two questions.
Here is some basic information I can share on our setup:
When creating a new Staff user I just go in manually and provision the Shared Calendar in the users account. It is somewhat a pain, but this way 1)I can be sure it is done and 2)the Calendar naming is the same accross accounts. A setting in COA for a Shared Calendar would be very nice!:->
For our office calendar, I just created a separate user and a new calendar for that user and share that new calendar. I thought it would be a tad cleaner that way and so far it is working well.
Hope this info helps!

[dmartens]

Thanks for your reply. If there is not an automated way to do this, your solution of provisioning the shared calendars seems reasonable.

I'm a bit concerned that the large number of shared calendars will become unmanageable. 3 schools, all district, fine arts, a myriad of sports at all levels, facilities, etc. Consolidating these into manageable groups of events could be complicated.

I also need to think of the best way parents need to view these events. I'm looking at phpicalendar and scripting the updating of the ics files to our web server. phpicalendar allows individuals to aggregate different calendars into their own personal calendar view, quite powerful.