February 08, 2005
Sarah Jones and Roger Rosenblum, IST–WSS
"CalAgenda Tips" is a regular feature of
iNews for people on campus
who are using the CalAgenda
online calendar service (http://calagenda.berkeley.edu/) or just
want to learn more about the service. Not all topics will be of interest
to all readers; some topics may be too basic for some readers and others
too technical, but we hope to address the concerns and issues of as
broad a segment of the campus community as possible. If you have
suggestions for topic ideas, please send email to
In Oracle Calendar, a resource is usually an inanimate object, such as a meeting room, a computer lab, a laptop, a vehicle, or other piece of equipment. Resources are designed for use by calendar users either via invitation or via designate rights. For instance, if access rights for the resource account have been set to permit it, users may "invite" a resource along with meeting attendees when scheduling a meeting.
Your group's CalAgenda account administrator [1] should send the following information regarding the new resource to the central CalAgenda administrators:
1. Directory information: Send us the following information in tab-delimited form [2]:
Note that service subscribers using a client version 9.0.4 or later can see all of the above information on a resource, if it has been added. [4]
2. Reservation conflicts: The default is "no conflicts permitted"; however you can request that booking conflicts be permitted (referred to as double-booking). For example, this parameter is useful if you wish to allow more than one event to occur concurrently, say several activities going on in a gym at the same time. Most of the time, we recommend using the default value.
3. Booking approval: The default value is "no approval required", but you can request that reserving a particular resource requires a resource manager or contact person to approve the reservation. Setting this parameter is useful when you wish to restrict access to a resource. Most of the time, we recommend using the default value.
You can log in to a resource account by entering the resource name preceded by r:, re:, or res: at the login prompt (note that you currently cannot do this with the web client). You need to know the exact name of the resource or, at minimum, the first word in the name of the resource. For instance, you could enter r:Evans 220 Conference Room or at least r:Evans, but not words which occur later in the resource name like 220 Conference Room. It is important to note that unlike other CalAgenda accounts, resource accounts only allow you to change passwords and to set up access rights.
The account password starts out as the default CalAgenda password. The account password should be changed to something known to the appropriate people in your group after you open the new account (ask your group's CalAgenda account administrator for the password [1]).
The person who requests a resource account usually sets up the access rights for the resource. To set up access rights, you need to log directly onto the resource account using the CalAgenda resource name and password. The "Access Rights" menu is found under the "Tools" menu in the desktop clients. Select a person in the bottom box and then set that person's access rights to the resource.
Designate rights
A designate is a person assigned the right to modify the agenda of
another user or resource. However, designates may not change the access
rights of an account. Usually a resource account does not need a
designate unless the "Requires booking approval" parameter is set.
Note that designate rights cannot be made across service nodes. For instance,
someone on the Avantgenda server cannot be a designate for someone on
the CalAgenda server.
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Viewing rights
Usually you want to give others the right to view normal entries in a
resource or, at a minimum, see the times that are reserved.
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Scheduling rights
Normally you want to give
others the right to invite a resource to a meeting, especially if it is
a conference room, laptop, or projector.
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Tasks rights
You will rarely have a resource with tasks, but rights can be set if
needed.
We have received virtually no problem reports about outside groups reserving resources not normally associated with them. A more frequent occurence is forgetting to renew a resource reservation.
For example, you scheduled a meeting room for your biweekly staff meeting. One day your staff appear outside the meeting room and find someone else in the room. What happened? You may have scheduled the room for a specific time slot for a certain period of time, such as January through September. It is now October and you forgot to extend the reservation, so someone else was able to reserve the room for that time slot.
If you are concerned about limiting access to a resource, you can require booking approval (see item 3 under "Requesting a resource") or grant scheduling rights individually to the people you wish to allow to it.
[1] To look up your CalAgenda account administrator's name, go to the CalAgenda Support Provider Lookup page (http://calagenda.berkeley.edu/help_training/support_providers/index.html) and enter your CalAgenda account User Name.
[2] One way to do this is by using an Excel spreadsheet and saving the file as "Text (Tab delimited)". A submission in tab-delimited form would look like the following:
Resource name‹tab›Number‹tab›Capacity‹tab›Last name‹tab›First name‹tab›Phone‹tab›Fax‹tab›Description
[3] See Naming conventions, searching, and other helpful information on CalAgenda resources, BC&C, Fall 2003.
[4] To see this additional resource information as a service subscriber, do the following: Under Tools in the menu, select Search Directory. Next, select Resources. Then, select Search by Resource. Next, enter the first word in the resource's CalAgenda name in the box under Resource Name. Then, select the resource's full name that appears in the list box. Finally, click on the Information button.
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or type the person's name in the box and
click the check button 
. After the
person's name appears in the box containing "Default:
Any unlisted person", select the person's name and set
the designate rights you wish to give the person. The
easiest way to assign full designate rights is to click
the "Full designate rights" button. Oski Bear has been
given full designate rights in the image on the left.