February 03, 2006
Sarah Jones, IST-WSS
It is easy and quick to use your CalAgenda calendar to let your colleagues know that you are on vacation, or out of the office for some other reason, such as illness, jury duty, or an appointment. This article will discuss possible ways to do this using a vacation as an example.
There are a number of different ways to keep vacation information in CalAgenda and share it with others. The simple approach is to do two things:
You probably want to do both of these.
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Another way is to use a role or resource account for your group's vacation schedule. Such a "vacation account" has the advantage of displaying the vacation times of everyone in your group in one calendar. This type of setup is most useful when a group is trying to determine coverage, i.e., ensuring that enough people are at work at any time.
Whether to use a role account or a resource account is mainly a question of who will be entering the vacation information. If individuals will be entering their own vacation information, a resource account will be adequate. Vacation-goers simply invite the resource to their vacation "event". The resource account is only logged into to set access rights permissions.
If a staff member will be coordinating vacations centrally, particularly for people who don't have CalAgenda accounts, a role account will be necessary. The vacation administrator will log into the role account directly and enter the vacations.
If you choose a resource account, be sure to request that the resource allow double-booking (more than one event at a time.)
How your group uses a vacation account will vary depending on how big your group is, who wants to view the vacation calendar, and why. Get an account, try using it with a small group, and see what works best. Keeping the process as easy to do as possible for individuals may be the most successful. Here are some things to consider:
Viewing more than two or three vacations scheduled at the same time in the meeting area of the agenda can be difficult when looking at the agenda graphically. If your account is going to show more than two or three individuals' simultaneous vacations, you should consider using the Day Event or Daily Note instead of the meeting agenda. The Day Event or Daily Note work conveniently for perhaps 10 people on vacation (or having appointments, etc.) in one day.
If your account is going to keep track of 15 or more people, you probably want to consider grouping the people into logical groups and using a vacation account for each group.
We advise the vacation account administrator to allow everyone in the group to view and invite the vacation account to events. This way everyone in the group can simply invite the vacation calendar when they are going to be out of the office for vacation, illness, etc. If someone outside of the group, such as a director, needs to see whether someone is at work or not, give the person viewing access to the vacation calendar. Viewing access can either be Times Only, which probably isn't useful for this particular type of calendar, or Full Viewing Rights, which would permit the viewer to see the names of those who appear on the calendar.
Recently, someone asked about using the calendar account for vacation approvals by the group supervisor. The proposal was that only the supervisor would have write access to the vacation calendar, and if the vacation was not approved, it would not appear on the calendar. My question was "What do you do if the supervisor is on vacation, and someone is going to be out because they are sick or needs to go to the dentist because a filling fell out?" Vacation approval is something that is best done outside of the calendar as part of a workflow process.
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