live@edu | Thomas' Work Space

How to make changes to a meeting request to update/alter a reservation

2012/01/10 plagwitz 2 comments

You can easily release a reservation of an LRC room or resources, completely or partially (e.g. some of the time when you return an item earlier than anticipated), from your calendar in OWA/NINERMAIL:
By opening the meeting request
1. In (staff:)OWA,
2. go to your calendar
3. find and open your meeting
4. make changes to the meeting, e.g. start and end time
5. click “Send Update”
6. (students:)NINERMAIL: looks like you have to cancel the meeting and recreate it with new times. This may change once we get the calendars used by students set up to autoaccept.
More conveniently, without opening:
1. right-click on and choose delete the appointment (if necessary, the system is smart enough to ask you whether you want to delete an entire series of appointments or only this occurrence; on cancelling, see also here).
2. Or to release the reservation partially (= reduce the time), drag the upper or lower margin to the new desired start or end time.
3. If you are working with a meeting request (which by definition has more than the organizer as participants, unlike appointments you make for yourself on your calendar; be wary of making changes to meeting requests which you are not the organizer of (= you did not initially create the meeting request)), the system offers you – and should should accept – to notify the other participants automatically.
4. Which in this case is not a person, but only (unless other people have been included in the resource booking which can be done) a resource mailbox which, if configured to autoaccept, may still respond to you like so, in this case with an acceptance, since you can not cause a conflict when releasing a resource that had been reserved for you):
6. This also only affects the occurrence you are currently working with, as you can see from the stricken-out recurrence icon that results:
7. This flexibility is one of the main reasons (= better resource utilization) why we introduced this system: so that users who want to visit the LRC with their class/borrow a resource on short (often happens, depending on pedagogy, with a couple off days or less ) notice don’t have to be turned away with no good reason.
8. Just do not try updating from the publically viewable web calendars, those are for “view”-ing only, including by students:

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers Tags: 2007, 2010, 2011, calendaring, live@edu, ms-exchange, outlook, outlook-live, scheduling

Protected: LRC Outlook/Exchange Resource mailboxes update for Winter 2012

2012/01/05 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

Categories: audience-is-IT-staff, e-infrastructure, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, Metrics, Spreadsheets Tags: 2007, 2010, 2011, calendaring, live@edu, ms-exchange, outlook, outlook-live, resources, scheduling

Meeting Requests in OWA – from the source

2011/12/22 plagwitz 1 comment

The Scheduling Assistant

Add or Remove Attendees

Select a Meeting Room

Reply To or Forward a Meeting Request

And more: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/bb899488.aspx

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, documentation, e-infrastructure, service-is-library Tags: 2007, 2010, 2011, calendaring, FAQs, live@edu, ms-exchange, outlook, outlook-live, resources

How to book LRC resources – explained in one screenshot

2011/12/02 plagwitz 3 comments

You can come to the LRC reception desk to book an item (you will still need to log into your NINERMAIL). But you can also self-help, and get immediate confirmation, from any device with access to your NINERMAIL:

If you have a basic LRC classroom booking scenario, send to the room lrcroomcoed434@uncc.edu what looks like “an email that includes times”: Go to your Ninermail inbox. Using the little triangle icon, unfold the “New” menu. Click menu item “Meeting request”. In the window, that opens, in the “Resources:” field, put lrcroomcoed434@uncc.edu. In the “Subject:”, put your course number. Enter start and end times of your classes visit. In the upper left, Click “Send”. Within a few seconds you receive a response email from the room in OWA: If you did not check the “Scheduling Assistant” tab, you may be asked to reschedule because of a conflict. If you fail to get a response, something went wrong, did you mistype the address? OWA remembers and suggests it after first use, but the first time you need to get it right.

For more advanced scenarios (beyond #3 below), first find the email address of our bookable resources, then book it like so:

LRC Outlook/Exchange 2010 Resource Calendaring: How to display a Room/Staff/Tutor calendar aggregate at the reception desk using live@edu

2011/09/28 plagwitz 1 comment

The LRC needs an overview aggregate calendar of its many rooms and services for clients in the entrance area. This should be always on display on the higher one of the reception area dual screen computers when screens are in extended mode
From the calendar mailbox in OWA , these calendars can and have been published to the internet.
1. LRC assistants can load and bookmark multiple (published or shared) calendars in their OWA, but there are limitations
  1. We do not want to clutter LRC Assistants OWA with LRC calendars more than we have to.
  2. OWA displays calendars (currently = 2011) only side-by-side, there is no overlay (=aggregate) mode like in Outlook 2010, and only up to 5 simultaneously, again unlike Outlook 2010 (30) (Students do not have Outlook (although it is being considered installing it on student staffed computers).
2. A standard web browser allows for display of only one (HTML) calendar at a time in a web browser.
3. ICS compatible applications like live@edu

can display many (=aggregate) ICS-based calendars in overlay mode.
In addition, it is easy to change the display color (like in Outlook 2010) and display color (unlike in Outlook 2010, for me at least).
In live@edu, this looks promising:
To display more meaningful/less misleading subjects than “Busy” for pseudo-rooms (“offices” like LRC assistants or language tutors), add a subject (office name “LRC Assistant”or max class-level tutored).
To have LRC assistants easily and consistently load this aggregate calendar view,
1. we need to give tutors the password to uncc-lrc credentials – being “friends” not enough (which makes their own access to SkyDrive which we finally achieved yesterday useless – unless they log in as themselves and as uncc-lrc in 2 different browsers)
2. However, I have not found a way to aggregate calendar ics files and display them without password (ideally in Joomla)
3. Workaround: use a AutoIT auotmation script that runs when LRC Assistant logs in form the All users Startup Folder.

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, e-infrastructure, Reception-desk Tags: 2007, 2010, 2011, calendaring, live@edu, ms-exchange, outlook, outlook-live, resources, scheduling

Skydrive@uncc.edu

2011/09/27 plagwitz Leave a comment

Ninermail’s live@edu implementation includes SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud document sharing and collaboration solution,
Log in with your UNCC credentials at http://skydrive.live.com:
OK, you may have to reset your password, then log in:

Categories: e-infrastructure, Glitches&Errors Tags: live@edu, MS-OneDrive

How not to book LRC equipment: Scheduling conflicts

2011/09/23 plagwitz 3 comments

Do not send a meeting request to an item for a time when the item has a prior meeting request.
The tab: scheduling assistant within the meeting request you edit is there to tell you when items have prior meeting requests.

A “blocked” timeline denotes a prior meeting request: The item has already been booked (solid block) or requested (hatched block) during the start and end time of your meeting. Do not crash their party.
“blank” timeline means “item is free”. Go ahead: You can request a meeting with this item between your start and end time.
Once you have this overview, you can easily remove, by right-clicking on the resource, extra resources that you cannot book or could, but which you do not need:

Once the university has mail-enabled your cloud-accounts on campus, we will have a computer decline such conflicting requests automatically, and force you to start over with a new meeting request. It will be still worth your while memorizing the above: You can save time and avoid disappointment.

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, documentation, e-infrastructure, service-is-library Tags: 2007, 2010, 2011, calendaring, live@edu, ms-exchange, outlook, outlook-live, resources, scheduling

Exchange 2010 and Live@edu: How to use resource calendar publishing to implement a help desk timetable and signup sheet

2011/09/22 plagwitz 1 comment

Calendar sharing with students that have only cloud accounts in live@edu requires them to be mail-enabled users in on-premise AD and only works if a users privileged to share shares with individuals through the GUI (in our circumstances: no groups, no PowerShell access).
Workaround to share resource calendar information is: publish calendars to the internet. This needs careful consideration of privacy issues, but Exchange 2010 provides you with a number of helpful options, including “availability only”.
If you publish, you can easily generate the links from the resource mailbox name, and manage large sets of calendars e.g. in an MS-Excel Web app.
As you can see in the below LRCTutor12 calendar subscribed to in either OWA or Windows Live, the Exchange 2010 ICS does not seem to provide the calendar name, users have to update it manually (maybe use the resource mailbox account name from the calendar URL).
2. If you “hack” resource calendars to be a help desk timetable (support personnel, like lab assistants/tutors, one calendar per language, sharing the support role), and have personnel update their availability with late-breaking changes through their Outlook calendars (“cancel this occurrence”) and automatically get these changes pushed out to all users over the internet.
3. You can also “hack” a signup sheet “on steroids”:
  1. enforce a MaximumDurationInMinutes suitable for a sign-up appointment duration)
  2. set the AutomateProcessing option to AutoUpdate,
  3. accept the meeting requests of lab assistants/tutors at term start, so that they appear as solid blocks in the calendar, and advise clients trying to sign-up that only 1 client can sign-up during any given solid block with the office.
  4. Then ignore meeting requests of clients during the term (but communicate the rule to clients: only one client can sign up for support from the “office” during any given time slot. There is in my knowledge no way to set a number in Exchange 2010. Neither MaximumConflictInstances nor ResourceCapacity are applicable). The client meeting requests will remain tentative and appear hatched in the calendar for any other client to see.
  5. It is advisable to publish the calendar not with “Availability” only, but with “Limited Detail”, so that additional information (office hours dedicated to specific support topics/clinics, specific requests by clients) can be passed back and forth between support personnel and clients (and anything is better than “Free/Busy” which is especially misleading for such office calendars). Note that even if OrganizerInfo is included on-premise, it seems not included on calendars published to the internet (option “public”; “restricted” has not been tested), which makes Limited Detail possible in our environment.
4. Publishing the calendar to the internet with “Full details” could be used for passing additional information, like special handling instructions to student workers,
5. Ìt appears that a calendar can not simultaneously be published "public" and "restricted" (need to know the obscure URL), let alone with different levels of information included.