August 2003 — Industry Perspective
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Campus Calendaring Systems Help Keep the College Community Involved, Informed
Architecture
In most calendaring systems, calendar data is stored either on users' desktops or in a central location. The ideal system should support a combination of the two. In the local scenario, users manipulate and display calendars using local software, but the primary disadvantage is that maintaining the required software on hundreds or thousands of users' computers can be a tedious proposition. With the central calendar location, maintaining the accuracy and currency of a central schedule is clearly easier formultiple, distributed calendars. But it d'es require that users have access to a network connection to view and alter their calendars.
Usability
Calendar views. For the vast majority of campus calendar users, the key to a successful system is the ease with which they can view and display calendar information. A flexible system allows users to select the global view, recognizing that it may be extremely crowded, or one or more subsets that are of particular interest at the moment. Furthermore, the student might like to view the selected information for a specific time period. Students will also want flexibility to display the results in either wall calendar style or as a text list, as well as the ability to download the results into a PDA or laptop.
Subscriptions and alerts. A very useful calendar feature allows users to subscribe to a particular calendar so that new events and changes are automatically e-mailed to the user. Even greater flexibility allows the user to subscribe to specific events or for specific time periods, so that all changes to those events or dates result in an e-mail message to the subscriber. The ideal system would also allow alerts to be sent by alternate methods, such as to a pager or other wireless device.
Authentication
A campus calendaring system should validate users against the access controls for calendar information before providing it to ensure users are accessing only authorized information. However, a campus calendaring system should not impose user IDs and passwords to control access. It should use LDAP (lightweight directory access protocol) or integrate with an existing single sign-on or authentication system to make the calendaring system easier to administer and use. Integration with a campus portal may be one way to achieve this goal.
Access
The reach of a campus calendaring system helps determine its success. At the very least, it must be accessible via the Web from desktops, laptops and public terminals. Ideally, it should also offer a subset of functions to PDAs and, perhaps, to cell phone users. The user interface for all of these users is an ordinary Web browser.
Integration
Course scheduling. Although extremely important, personal, event and resource scheduling systems are just one aspect of campus scheduling. The other critical scheduling arena involves the work of scheduling courses, students and classroom facilities. The algorithms used for academic scheduling are very sophisticated and bear little resemblance to the work of scheduling and maintaining group and personal calendars. Therefore, it is not necessary for a campus calendaring system to tackle the actual work of academic scheduling. However, it can be extremely helpful for the campus calendaring system to serve as the single window into academic schedules as well as event and resource calendars.
