August 2003 — Industry Perspective

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Campus Calendaring Systems Help Keep the College Community Involved, Informed

By Andrew Sherman, President and CEO, WebEvent Inc.

Higher education institutions are very decentralized. Departments operate independently and cater to diverse audiences of alumni, parents, students and faculty - all of which have distinct needs and interests. As a result, scheduling and tracking events, course schedules, meeting rooms and other resources are massive tasks that often intensify with the requirement for publishing online calendars. Despite these challenges, campus calendaring systems are vital to on-campus life, as well as for maintaining and enhancing relationships with alumni, parents and the greater college community.

Integrated campus calendaring systems enable schedule and resource owners to control their domains, while allowing authorized users to enter and modify schedule information. These systems also provide multiple views into the master calendar, permitting users to see either the entire campus schedule or just the subsets of current interest. In addition, a good calendaring system is an effective community builder that serves as the focal point for the activities of a small club on campus, as well as helps the entire alumni body remain connected to the school and feel like part of the larger campus community.

Calendaring and scheduling on most campuses include the following activities:

  • Event calendaring to publish and promote events to campus residents, alumni and the surrounding community. Calendar users generally want to view all campus events, events of a specific type (e.g., the chess club), or multiple subsets of events (e.g., football schedules, on-campus movies and live entertainment).
  • Personal and group calendars to store and present date-based information that is unique either to individuals or to specific groups.
  • Resource scheduling, which is the crucial task of ensuring that meeting rooms, projectors, lab equipment and other resources are available to the right people at the right time.

Selecting the Ideal Calendaring System

Understanding how users will interact with the calendaring system, as well as identifying immediate and long-term goals for a campuswide integrated system are the first steps. The next step is selecting a calendaring system that incorporates the following five capabilities:

  1. Flexible architecture that combines both distributed and centralized storage of calendar information.
  2. Usability that offers flexible viewing and subset selection, browsing, subscriptions and alerts.
  3. Authentication that enables a single sign-on and links to existing authentication systems.
  4. Enables access from any location, using any wired or wirelessdevice.
  5. Integration with course scheduling systems, e-learning systems, personal calendars, e-mail, campus portals and personal electronic devices.