resources | Thomas' Work Space

The Scheduling Assistant is simply multiple calendars displayed as parallel timelines for easier comparison

2013/09/09 plagwitz Leave a comment

We are all conversant in reading a daily – like here for the classroom-, weekly or monthly calendar sheet:
If you send a Meeting request to the classroom to book it, the Scheduling Assistant displays exactly the same free/busy information for the classroom.
1. Same pattern of events as above:
2. Except that it is folded from a calendar into a timeline format (and in OWA does not display text explanatory beyond with what/whom the room is busy).
3. This timeline format may be less familiar, but is much more practical to compare the availability for the multiple participants of a meeting.
Compare here: Same pattern for the room booking on both views.

2013/09/06 plagwitz Leave a comment

Yes, you can! Overlay calendars, a much needed feature from Outlook Desktop (as we mentioned earlier) has finally made it into the web version of Outlook (in Office365 the migration of which from live@edu will be finished by the end off the month), as was announced today: “Users can have multiple calendars in a merged view.”
Example: In Outlook Desktop (not available to students), you can not only add a calendar like, icsexport.ics to the right, but, if you click on the (1) little black arrow, add/merge icsexport.ics to the (2) already overlaid calendars on the left, which is much more usable if you need to aggregate content from different sources:
And now also in OFFICE365 NINERMAIL:
This should make the sharing of calendar information much easier, not only for the about 100 LRC resource calendars, but also for other useful calendars that are published on campus:
1. the new LCS calendar
2. the registrar’s academic calendar
3. the campus-wide faculty calendar
4. last not least: your Moodle calendar (view all your moodle assignment deadlines in one place, the same place you check your email)
5. And more… ? Do you know of other calendars, and/or a way to discover them?
The details
1. yet need to be panned out. We assume the feature will “just work” like above in Outlook Desktop when you
  1. share a calendar or
  2. subscribe to a calendar.
2. We’ll provide more information and examples once we see this feature… TBA

2013/09/02 plagwitz Leave a comment

Load all equivalent resources for each resource type that you require.
Using the parallel free/busy timelines in the “Scheduling Assistant”, look for and “plug the holes” (in white):
1. In the above example,
  1. for the given time frame (between rad/green line), no item is completely available;
  2. however, if you adjust your time frame slightly to earlier in the morning, you would be able to book either camera13 and 17 (assuming you need only one) and micboom 2
Remove the resources from the “Attendee list that are non-white = busy for the start/end time that you require the resources for.
Click upper left menu: “Send” to book.

2013/08/22 plagwitz Leave a comment

We had a lot of problems over the last 2 years with students, unlike faculty and staff, not getting automated accepted/declined responses to their resource booking requests. This seems now finally a thing of the past:
In addition to automated responses in cases of policy violations or booking conflicts, we meant to automatically enforce policies that restrict booking of certain resources to certain groups. While groups still need to be maintained manually, this is now possible (and being implemented first for film studies and film club students that have exclusive rights to our film equipment). And here is what it will look like: “You don’t have permission to book this resource”. Don’t hand out equipment to clients who got this response.

2013/08/17 plagwitz Leave a comment

2013/08/17 plagwitz Leave a comment

2013/05/29 plagwitz Leave a comment

Display all items in a category with a single click on the checkbox I front of the calendar group
Display any portion of the time line in " scheduling view" by
Selecting the days in the square calendar sheet in the upper left
Navigate the time line with the bottom horizontal scrollbar
Note the additional helpful "from [start date]" indicator in a mailboxes booking that is not displayed completely

2013/05/29 plagwitz Leave a comment

Right-click the left calendar tree.
Choose context menu item: add calendar group / from address list:
Type " LRC" to search – or the consistent naming scheme you implemented (I hope!).
Select all relevant calendars to add.
Click on button: "calendar".
Click on button: "ok":
Done: