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Scheduling - on Shared Domain Calendars
Idea shared by Curtis Kropar www.HawaiianHope.org - 2/13/2024 at 6:29 AM
Declined
I am not sure If am not seeing it, or if it is not possible.
We have several agency wide shared calendars for things like Volunteers, donation drop off's, pickups, etc..

I enabled "Scheduling" and Want to set up scheduling for the volunteer calendar, but the only option for "Calendar to use for appointments" is "My Calendar" and not the volunteer calendar.

Is there no way to use the shared domain "volunteer" calendar to schedule directly on it ? If "My Calendar" is the only option to schedule against, then why is it a drop down selector (making you think you have options.)
If not, that is my product suggestion, to make it that we can schedule directly against a domain shared calendar.

www.HawaiianHope.org - Providing technology services to non profit organizations, low income families, homeless shelters, clean and sober houses and prisoner reentry programs. Since 2015, We have refurbished over 11,000 Computers !

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Tim Uzzanti Replied
Employee Post
Scheduling is built off a users calendar.  It is the foundation of how everything works and is important because it has depencidies like organizers etc.  

We also do not allow multiple scheduling types per block (which was a request in another thread you had) for MANY reasons. 

I would suggest, you create a user@domain.com called VolunteerForHomless and enable scheduling for that user and share that calendar with whoever you want.

I would create additional users for additional types VolunteerForSober etc.

I'm not sure standalone scheduling services even offer everything you want but thought some of these suggestions might get you some of what you are looking for.  Hope this helps. 
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
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Hey Tim. 
We used to do that, each type of volunteer or staff that was in charge of a department or project had their calendar and shared it with everyone else. It turns into a constant maintenance issue when someone leaves us or someone new starts with us that needs access, Then everyone has to log into their individual calendars and grant access to people and take away access to others. 

Likewise, It is a problem in that, we have had staff leave us, I turn off their email account, but their calendar is still "shared" even though their email account is now completely disabled. Lisa was in Charge of Volunteers. I disabled Lisa's email account, then we get 4 new volunteers that join us and need access to the "volunteer" calendar, but Lisa's account is now disabled. Got to turn it back on, add the new people.

And just the fact that a shared calendar stays active and shared with everyone even though you disabled their email account, raises questions. If we had to terminate someone and are in legal issues with them, all of these people still having access to that persons calendar can potentially go and alter it, means we cant "preserve" the data as is. We woudl need to create yet another user account and then one by one migrate all relevant schedules and appointment over to that new user account, one at a time.

It really simplifies things if we have one central location where one person can manage things that are accessible company wide. I mean, that is the entire point of domain level admin, yes ? Policies that apply to everyone in the org. So we made several domain level calendars and now all of our appointments are on those calendars. It has drastically simplified things for us.

I would like you to reconsider. We can use this as is for now, as long as the other issues get fixed. But I was  really hoping to integrate it to our larger data system.
www.HawaiianHope.org - Providing technology services to non profit organizations, low income families, homeless shelters, clean and sober houses and prisoner reentry programs. Since 2015, We have refurbished over 11,000 Computers !
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Tim Uzzanti Replied
Employee Post
Some of what you are asking for isn't even in stand alone scheduling solutions.
 
Shared Calendars are very different than personal Calendars shared by a user and would require a rewrite to scheduling. What you're trying to do is a bit different than the standard person trying to setup a meeting with someone, which is what our Scheduling is intended to solve.  We will be continuing to add small features to Scheduling but will not do anything that requires foundational changes etc.  
 
In regards to the shared calendar not being disabled when the user is disabled, that is in our list and is going to be changed in few weeks and will apply to all shared resources.  
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
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Ok, Thanks Tim !
We are actually planning to build scheduling into our data system anyway, but when I saw that SM already has part of it i was hoping we could just write some API's and integrate it.  We will be able to use scheduling temporarily, but yes, will end up writing our own for our data system.

Thanks for the response !
www.HawaiianHope.org - Providing technology services to non profit organizations, low income families, homeless shelters, clean and sober houses and prisoner reentry programs. Since 2015, We have refurbished over 11,000 Computers !

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