August 2003 — Industry Perspective
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Campus Calendaring Systems Help Keep the College Community Involved, Informed
E-mail. To send reminders and other notifications to users, calendaring systems must integrate with campus e-mail. Fortunately, e-mail integration is quite easy to achieve due to the widespread adoption of e-mail standards such as POP, SMTP and IMAP. While some vendors have bundled calendaring and e-mail products, it is important to note that this approach limits a school from choosing best-of-breed products.
Portals. Portals, which provide a unified view of disparate systems, are making inroads into higher education. In addition to an integrated data view of campus information systems, portals frequently fulfill another important role by providing single sign-on capabilities. When anticipating the integration of a campus calendaring system with a portal, institutions should consider a Web-based calendaring system because they offer easy integration with most portal technology.
Personal electronics. Wireless networking has taken root on many college campuses, and connecting wireless devices to the campus calendar is an obvious choice. Therefore, calendar applications must be prepared to support near-real-time updates to a much larger population of remote devices. In addition, calendaring systems should support simple ways for users to select specific events that they want to download to their pocket calendars.
Who Owns Calendaring?
With all the key features established, the next problem is determining who owns the calendaring system. In some schools, campus calendaring is owned and managed by the information technology services group, because it is considered to be part of the campus infrastructure. In others, the calendar is considered to be an essential outreach vehicle, not unlike the alumni magazine, campus newsletters or the catalog used by prospective students. In these schools, the calendar is managed by a public affairs or marketing department.
Either approach can work, but schools must think carefully about their goals and how best to achieve them. One danger with the first approach is that IT departments may focus more on features and functions, which could lose the end-user focus that is necessary for successful calendaring. The risk with the second tactic is that the marketing group may not properly consider all of the infrastructure implications in a broadly used tool like a campus calendar.
Build vs. Buy
Universities tend to have pools of graduate and undergraduate student programmers, so it is often tempting to assign a group of student developers to create a calendaring system from scratch. The job can be even easier due to the growing availability of open source toolkits, such as the University of Washington's UW Calendar project (www.washington.edu/ucal).
One obvious disadvantage of student programmers is that they have a bad habit of leaving after they graduate. Even if a calendaring project is managed by the university IT department, employee turnover and project reassignments can jeopardize long-term projects like a calendaring system. The result is that for campus-critical systems like calendaring, many colleges and universities turn to software companies that specialize in building robust, full-featured calendaring systems that can be customized to their specific needs.
Summary
Campus calendars fill a very central role in student, faculty and staff life on campus. They also play a key part in keeping alumni, parents and the community involved and informed. The most capable systems provide public event calendaring; personal and group scheduling for faculty, staff and students; and resource reservation, while offering the ability to integrate with the campus portal and existing course scheduling systems.
Contact Information
WebEvent Inc.
Andover, MA
(978) 975-3344
www.webevent.com
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