UICalendar Services for Departments

UICalendar is a campus-wide calendaring and scheduling service offered by ACCC. UICalendar uses the Oracle Calendar Server, a component of Oracle's Collaboration Suite. This Web page introduces how to create, manage, and share all types of departmental calendars: event calendars and the schedules for departmental resources such as conference rooms, department-owned equipment, and departmental services.

UICal departmental calendars can be used for departmental functions such as the following:

• Schedule departmental meetings
  • Define groups of people to use for recurring meetings
  • Check for conflicts and suggest alternate times if necessary
  • Easy searching
• Publish events and departmental calendars
• Publish departmental address books
• Keeping track of contacts
• The Oracle Outlook Connector allows you to tie Microsoft Outlook into the UICalendar server and the ACCC mail servers. No need for an Exchange server.

The name of a departmental event calendar has the form deptcalname.deptcal where "deptcalname" is different for each calendar; deptcalname.deptcal is the login name given in the UICal Web utility.

There is a new function now available for Departmental Event Calendars: You can authorize your Departmental Event Calendar to display its public items on the Web in the format that the all-campus UIC Events Calendar uses. If you use the UIC Events Calendar Web interface to add these items, you can optionally have them included in the UIC Events Calendar itself. Only the public items in an authorized departmental Events Calendar will appear on the Web.

Doing this is called "Connecting the calendar to the UIC Events Calendar." The new functions available through this are the following:

• Easily display public events from your Events Calendar calendar in the all-campus UIC Events Calendar (which is at the More Events link on the UIC home page, or http://events.uic.edu).
  
  
• Easily display public events in your own public Events Calendar.
  
  
• People with individual UICalendar accounts can click a link when viewing an event and add that event to their own UICalendar calendar.
  
  
• Anyone can click link when viewing an event and download the event in iCalendar format, to import it into their other personal calendar software, such as Google calendar, iCal, or Outlook.
  

Departmental Events Calendars are regular departmental event calendars with special features, so they can be managed using Oracle Calendar clients. However, to use the special functions of the UIC Events Calendar interface, you will need to use the ACCC's Eventcal Web pages, introduced below.

The public Web address of a department's Events Calendar will be:

http://events.uic.edu?&defaultcal=deptcalname.deptcal

People who have permission to add events to the calendar can do so through the above Web address.

To authorize departmental Events Calendars for the UIC Events Calendar:

Departmental event calendars can be authorized for the UIC Events Calendar using the UICal Web utility, either when they are created, or by the calendar's owner later.

Using a departmental Events Calendar:

A departmental Events Calendar is used like the UIC Main Events Calendar Web page, except that (1) they don't have Classified Ads and (2) the public cannot add events to most departmental Events Calendars. Using the UIC Events Calendar Web Page has instructions on using the UIC Events Calendar page, from the user's point of view.

There are two types of Department Resource Calendars:

• Room-Reservation for scheduling rooms and
• Shared Resource for scheduling resources such as cameras, projectors etc.

The resource calendar names have the form resourcename.rescal, for example, bgrc_176.rescal, which is the resource calendar for my office in the Benjamin Goldberg Research Center, BGRC 176.

Resource calendars are somewhat-impaired standard Oracle calendars that can only be edited as designates.

All types of departmental calendars are created by your department's REACH representative. If you don't know who your department's REACH representative is, see Search for your Department's REACH member.
How-to instructions are given in Creating and Using Departmental Calendars.

All types of departmental calendars can be edited with UICalendar. The editing of department calendars with UICalendar after they are created can be done by anyone with a UICal account whom the calendar's owner assigns designate rights to for the calendar.
How-to instructions for assigning designate rights are given in Creating and Using Departmental Calendars.
How-to instructions for editing using designate rights are given in Creating and Using Departmental Calendars, also, in Editing Departmental Calendars Using Designate Rights.

The public events in a department Events calendars that will be displayed on their public Event Calendar Web page should be entered and edited with the Events calendar's Web page. (The same page that is used to display the calendar is used to edit it.)
How-to instructions are given in Using the Events Calendar Web Page

"Connecting" a department event calendar to the all-campus Events Calendar can be done easily now, either by the REACH member when he or she creates the calendar or by the calendar's owner at any time, using the UICal Web utility.
How-to instructions are given in Creating and Using Departmental Calendars.

The editing of an Events Calendar after it's created can be done by anyone that the owner of the calendar authorizes to "administer" the calendar. The calendar's owner uses their calendar's Events Calendar Web page to authorize other people as administrators to create and edit the public events displayed on the Web. Administrators do not have to have UICalendar accounts, but do need UIC netids and passwords.
How-to instructions for assigning administrator rights are given in Using the Events Calendar Web Page.
How-to instructions for creating and editing events in an Events Calendar Web Page are also given in Using the Events Calendar Web Page.

Like all UICalendar calendars, all departmental calendars must be owned by a single individual and can be logged into the calendar's login name and the owners' ACCC common password. However, all types of departmental calendars have an important difference from individual UICal calendars. They generally need to be managed -- added to, changed -- by several people. This creates a problem. The calendar owner uses their password for their other ACCC accounts -- to read ACCC email, and to login to all the ACCC, UIC, and U of I secure Web pages; the owner should not -- should never -- share his or her ACCC common password with anyone else.

To avoid sharing passwords, which would be a very bad thing, everyone -- including the owner -- who will modify a departmental calendar in UICalendar does it using designate rights and their own UICalendar account, or, in the case of Events Calendars and the EventCal Web page, administration rights and their UIC netid. The calendar owner can assign anyone with a UICal account the right to access a departmental calendar from their own UICal account or they can assign anyone with a UIC netid and password administrator rights to add or edit events to a departmental event calendar.

This is done differently for items that will be publicly displayed in a departmental Events Calendar and for all other Department Calendars. In this case, the necessary permission is call administrator permission, which allows a person to use the calendar's Event Web page.

See Creating and Using Departmental Calendars for instructions for creating both types of permissions.

In summary, you can edit departmental UICal calendars:

As a UICalendar agenda:

The calendar's owner logs into the actual departmental calendar account and sets designate rights for you; then,

1. You log in to your own UICal account.
2. File -> Agenda -> Open As Designate.
   
3. Then select the title of your department calendar from the list of calendars you have designate rights to.
   
4. Click OK.

For regular Departmental Event Calendars and Department Resource calendars, you will be able to do everything you need to do editing it this way.

For Departmental Event Calendars that are connected to the UIC Events Calendar, departmental Events Calendars, your ability to enter events that will be displayed in the UIC Events Calendar when editing as a UICalendar agenda will be limited:

• Items entered this way to departmental Events Calendars will not be added to the published calendar until the following day and will be displayed very generically.
• Remember to make the Access: Public on items you want published to public Events Calendars.

Using the Events Calendar Web Pages:

• For Events Calendars only, the easier and preferable way to submit or edit events is to use the Submitting Events links (see figure 2) on the calendar's Events Calendar Web interface:
  http://events.uic.edu?&defaultcal=deptcalname.deptcal
  where you substitute the name of your department calendar for deptcaltes.deptcal.
• The Events Calendar owner can automatically use the calendar's Events Calendar Web interface; he or she must authorize everyone else who will work on the calendar.
• Items submitted on an Events Calendar Web interface are included in the UIC Events Calendar immediately.
• You can take advantage of the extra fields and display properties that an Events Calendar has to offer when you use the Web interface.
• Other calendars can be invited. ("Other calendars" include the UIC Events Calendar and a college Events Calendar if one exists.)

Here we have a choice of okay and really, really good. In both cases, only events with Access Level of Public will be fully displayed on the Web.

Global Calendars for Standard Departmental Calendars

The Okay: Like any UICal calendar, the owner of an event or resource departmental calendar can turn on its Web Global Agenda, which allows the departmental calendar to be shared with anyone on the Web. The only problem is that the URL is very long and involved, so you will have to have it as a link on another Web page; you will not be able to give out the direct link.

How-to instructions for using Global Agendas are given in Creating and Using Departmental Calendars.

Figure 1: The Global Calendar for ACCC Documentation Meetings It's hard to read, I'm sorry. The Monday event was entered with the calendars Events Calendar Web page; I think you can see that it has a number of keywords. The Wednesday morning event is not public, so it just says the time is "Busy". The Wednesday afternoon and Thursday meetings were entered with UICalendar and are public.

Events Calendars

The Really Good: A departmental event calendar that has been connected to the UIC Events calendar, where the public events are displayed in the UIC Events Calendar format, and, if you select the UIC Events Calendar when you add the events, they are also displayed on the UIC Events Calendar itself. Also note that searches done on departmental Events calendars like this one only search the events in that departmental calendar.

How-to instructions for using "connecting" departmental event calendars to the UIC Events Calendar are given in Creating and Using Departmental Calendars.
How-to instructions for editing and administrating Departmental Events Calendars are given in Using the Events Calendar Web Page.

Figure 2: A Departmental Events Calendar This is the ACCC Documentation Meetings calendar. Its URL is: http://events.uic.edu?&defaultcal=accc_docum.deptcal Note that searches done on departmental Events calendars like this one only search the events in the current departmental calendar.

..