UICalendar -- Your Calendar Wherever, Whenever You Want It

• What Is UICalendar?
• What Does UICalendar Do?
• Open Your UICalendar Account
• UICal Clients -- Take Your Pick(s)
• UICalendar Download and Install

UICalendar is a calendar and scheduling tool that does what no other calendar has ever done. It's wherever you want it to be, and you can access it pretty much however you want to -- on paper, on your PDA, on your PC, and on the Web. It even works with Microsoft Outlook.

UICalendar uses Oracle's CorporateTime clients and an ACCC central server to provide calendaring services similar to an Outlook Exchange server or the ACCC's Meeting Maker, which it is replacing.

There's a UICalendar Web client that you can use from anywhere. UICal will also work with your PDA if you wish, and there are native clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Because the calendar itself is kept on an ACCC server, you don't have to choose one to use; you can use all of them! And you won't lose your calendar if your PC crashes or if the dog runs off with your PDA.

Any member of the UIC faculty or staff can use UICalendar at no cost. (We plan to add student access sometime during the 2003-2004 academic year.)

Each person with a UICal account has full rights to control access to his or her UICal data. By default, only you can see your data, but you can give other individuals the right to view the times you are busy or even manage all or parts of your calendar for you. (See UICal Sharing and Scheduling for more information.)

UICalendar has four type of "entries" that you can create: meetings, tasks, daily notes, and day events. What might you use them for?

• Classes? In UICal, they would be recurring meetings because they occur on specific days at specific times, and you're busy when you do them.
• Doctor's appointments? Again meetings.
• Birthdays? They would be recurring day events in UICal because they occur on specific dates, they're recurring, but they don't necessarily take up your time.
• The tasks you've completed in the course of a day at work or a daily journal? Daily notes are for you.
• A work or class project? Enter this as a task, which may either be ongoing or have a specific start or end date. Tasks are also labeled by priority, by whether they've been started yet, and by what percent completed they are.
• Need a reminder? You can set reminders for any type of UICal entry -- meeting, day event, daily note, or task (except for tasks on Macs). If you just want to set a reminder and a time is involved, then use a meeting; otherwise, a daily note would make sense. You can set UICal to give you reminders at specific times via popup messages (in which case UICal has to be running) or email.
• Having trouble setting up a meeting with someone? Have UICal email them a URL for your UICal Global Agenda, which shows when you're busy and when you're free. And since it's just a URL, they don't have to have a UICal account to see it. (And it's up-to-date; it displays your current UICal data, changing as you change it.) If you can't find a time to meet that way, there isn't one! Or better yet, if you both have UICal accounts, then you can open your agendas up in a group calendar together. And the CorporateTime native client or the Outlook Connector can even suggest suitable times.
• Need to find something? Searching is easy in UICal. You can search for people by any part of their name or by their initials. You can also search your agenda or someone else's if you have permission by attendees, meetings, titles, notes, words, whatever.

And there's lots more that UICal has to offer.

• Add rooms and resources to UICal, which allows it to keep track of their scheduling. An individual acts as the designated administrator of the resource. By choosing who he or she gives permission to "invite" the resource to meetings, the administrator can control who can schedule the use of the resource.
• Publish events and departmental calendars.
• Publish departmental address books.
• Keep track of contacts.

For now, UIC faculty and staff can open UICalendar accounts; we hope to have the resources to allow students to use UICalendar sometime during the upcoming academic year.

You can open your UICal account using the ACCC Account Creation Web page; go to the ACCC Web page: http://www.accc.uic.edu
Click the purple Accounts button, then select Accounts - Open an ACCC Account.

Click Login, login with Bluestem, select an ACCC common password if necessary. Then select UICal from the New Accounts section.

You can use any or all of the UICal clients in any combination. A change you make in one client will be reflected in your calendar as displayed by the other clients. The sync conduits have time delays, of course; changes are transferred to or from PDAs only when a synchronization is performed.

UICalendar on the Web

UICal on the Web: http://uical.uic.edu
This is the simplest way use UICalendar; it's a good way to check it out to see whether you want to use it seriously -- it's easy to use and nearly full-featured. And, of course, because it's available anywhere that you have access to a Web browser and an Internet connection, it's great when you're on the road. Finally, its Global Agenda feature allows anyone you want, including people who don't have UICal accounts, to see your calendar with the times that you're busy marked off (see Sharing on the Web).

UICalendar CorporateTime Clients

Native CorporateTime clients are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. They are very similar to the UICal on the Web interface, but are a bit easier to use and have the fullest complement of features.

Figure 1. A Sample of UICalendar -- the UICalendar Agenda Pane This is the UICalendar Windows client (the Mac client looks very much the same, as does the Web page) displaying Ada Byron's agenda in the weekly view. You can see that the icon for week view has been clicked (the depressed button in the center of the third group on the toolbar, under the menu bar). The task pane, which is at right of the agenda pane in the daily view, isn't displayed in the weekly or monthly view. The connected plugs at the end of the status bar (bottom right) mean that Ada is working online i.e., she is connected to the UICalendar server. Color plays an important part in the UICal display. By default, meetings you've said you're going to attend are colored green, ones you're not attending are red, and meetings that you've been invited to and haven't responded to yet are blue.

UICalendar CorporateTime Outlook Connector

The CorporateTime Outlook Connector is useful for people who already use Microsoft Outlook's calendaring features. The Outlook Connector allows you to use the familiar Outlook to display and manage your UICalendar calendar database. The first step in the installation of the Outlook Connector is to export your current Outlook calendar, note, and task data, and the last is to import it back into UICalendar.

The CorporateTime Outlook Connector also supports synchronizing PDAs with most types of third-party Outlook-PDA sync software.

Please note that the ACCC does not support the use of Outlook, either for calendaring or email, and does not at this time support the UICalendar/CorporateTime Outlook Connector.

The Outlook Connector can also provide the groupware scheduling services of an Outlook Exchange server, provided that all the people and resources in your groups have UICalendar accounts and have given you proper permission to access their data. See UICal Sharing and Scheduling.

CorporateTime Sync Conduits for PDAs

CorporateTime sync conduits for PocketPCs, Mac/Palm, and Win/Palm PDAs allow you to use your UICalendar on your PDA, along with any or all of the other UICal clients.

The ACCC does not at this time have much experience with using the CorporateTime sync conduits; if you decide to use one, we would appreciate hearing how it worked. We strongly recommend that you back your PDA up before trying to use a CorporateTime sync conduit. We also recommend that you designate either the PC or the PDA as being definitive, and generally sync from the PC to the PDA or vice versa. (The CorporateTime sync conduits sometimes get confused and you can end up with two copies of the same entry.)

You can also sync your PDA with UICal through Outlook if you're using the Outlook Connector; see above. But don't do both. I know from extremely unpleasant experience that that doesn't work.

Downloads for all the CorporateTime clients are on a single Web page:
http: //www.accc.uic.edu/software/uicalendar/downloads.html
There are separate Web pages in the appendix of the UICalendar Web site that explain how to install each CorporateTime client.

Comments are welcome; send them to
Judith Grobe Sachs, judygs@uic.edu