UICal Sharing and Scheduling

• UICal for Groups
• Part 1: Sharing in UICal
• Part 2: Sharing by URL

Thus far in our discussion of UICalendar, we've mostly been talking about the kinds of things that you would do with calendars and datebooks, but UICalendar and CorporateTime is designed to do and be a lot more than that.

Meetings, for example. They aren't something that you just go to. You schedule them, invite people to them, reserve meeting rooms or other resources for them, send reminder emails about them, and collect RSVPs for them. UICal can do all of that. If it's a recurring meeting, you'll only have to set it up once, and UICal can take care of everything for the repeats.

Do you often work with the same people? Scheduling meetings with them would be a lot easier if you make yourselves a group. UICal supports three kinds of groups, which are named for the people who have access to them: public, private (only the person who created it can see or use it), and members only. Individuals can only create private or members only groups. Groups can be very useful for departments and other, well, groups.

Using meetings and groups together with CorporateTime access rights -- which you use to give other people access to your UICal data; more about them in the next section -- gives you one of the glories of UICalendar -- group agenda views. Or, if you'd rather, give UICal a list of people (either one at a time or a proper CorporateTime group) whose UICalendar accounts you have proper access rights for and it will suggest times that you can meet. Can it get better than that?

By default, you are the only person with a UICalendar account who can see or change your UICal calendar data, and you are the only person who can invite you to a meeting. This is a good thing, because you really don't want just anyone looking at your calendar agenda, notes, or tasks or inviting you to a meeting. But the best part of the online scheduling software is your ability to share information with colleagues who need to know it. So UICal allows you to change the access rights to your UICal data to allow freer access to people with UICal accounts who need it.

And CorporateTime gives you lots of choices in "freer." If you just want to allow specific people to invite you to meetings, you can do just that. If you'd like someone to know when you're busy but not what you're doing, you can do that -- view only access. That's what Charles Babbage did for Ada in the group view. If you'd like them to know what you're doing too, like Grace Hopper did for Ada, then you set view entries access.

Do you work closely with enough with one or two people that you'd like them to be able to create, view, edit, and reply to entries in your name? You can do that in UICalendar. It's called Designate rights, and you can assign them very specifically too -- separately and at different levels for each type of entry (meetings, day events, notes, and tasks).

The UICal Web pages explain how to do set access rights on the Web, in the native clients, and in Outlook: http://www.accc.uic.edu/software/uicalendar/getstart.html#Access

Figure 1. UICal Group View Ada Byron Lovelace has opened Alan Turing, Charles Babbage, and Grace Hopper's agendas in group view so she can schedule a meeting. Today doesn't seem to be a good day. The first column is all four combined, with the times that anyone is busy marked off in red; unless everyone is an early riser, this might not be the best day for a meeting with these four people. The next four columns are each person's agenda for that day separately. Charles's only has the times that he is busy marked off because he gave Ada view only access rights to his agenda. Grace gave Ada view entries access rights to her agenda, so hers includes the title and location of her busy times. Ada's "Lunch with Ada" is blue, because Grace just put the invitation in her agenda and Ada hasn't answed it yet. I expect she intends to say yes. <g>

A friend or colleague doesn't need a UICal account to see an up-to-date copy of the your busy times in your UICal calendar. All you have to do is turn on UICal global agenda viewing on the Web and send them its URL.

First you have to turn it on: Login to UICal on the Web (https://uical.uic.edu/), click the gold wrench Tool icon on the right side of the UICal Web toolbar, and select the Edit Preferences link from the small box that opens. On the General tab/link, select some time zone other than the right one, say Mexico's, and click OK. (Yes, you read correctly. It's a bug. Oracle knows about it; this is the official fix for it.) Now go back and click the Tool icon again, select Edit Preferences, and on the General tab/link select the right time zone, which for now is CS6CDT, Central Daylight Time. (If you don't know what time zone to choose, click the question mark beside the pulldown box and look it up.) Then click the Security tab/link, click Allow Global Agenda Viewing, and click OK. Now you've turned on the global agenda and properly set its time zone.

When you get back to your UICal daily, weekly, or monthly view, you will see a link on the left side above the tool bar saying Email Agenda to a friend, which opens a Web page that allows you to do just that. Your friend will receive an email message with a long, strange URL that will give them a read-only look at your busy times.

Below are an email message that Ada sent to colleague and the Web page that that colleague will see. (Click on the URL in and you'll see Ada's global agenda yourself.) Way cool.

Figure 2. UICal Global Agenda The top is a sample of the email messages that UICal sends; Ada supplied the text below the URL. The bottom is Ada's global agenda. The link the hand is pointing to opens an email message addressed to Ada.

To: turing@uic.edu From: adabyron@uic.edu Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 13:04:23 -0400 Subject: Global Agenda Ada Byron Lovelace has sent you the following Agenda link: https://uical.uic.edu: 443/fcgi-bin/swc/lexacal.fcgi?go=gbl&viw= %b6%bc%b8%b8%a2%ae%b2%b0&xen=%e6%e9%e0%ec%f4%ed%ed%ee%ef&server= %a2%b1%ba%bb%b7%b9%b3%ba%be%92%cf%81%80%ca%90%8f%84%c6%8c%8e%9e%c0%dc%de%df%c0 Hi, Alan, I'd like to meet with you next week to talk about your machine. When is convenient? Ada