Here are some examples and some guidance on how to pick the right number of calendars for your organization. The simplest answer is that you need to purchase one calendar for each unique VIEW you want to create.

For example, you have a company with 9 departments. You would like to be able to view each department by itself or view the company as a whole. You can do this one of two ways. You can purchase a 10-calendar license and create a calendar for each department and a rollup or combined calendar for viewing the whole company. The other way you could do this is to use use one calendar and create an Event Type for each department. You could then view the calendar by Event Type to show a specific department or you could view by calendar to see all events together.

The trade-off is cost versus flexibility. Fewer calendars means a lower license fee but at the cost of being able to view your events in different ways. Here's a comparison of the two methods.

Method

Single Calendar with sub-views created by using Event Types

Advantages

Lower cost Little or no security configuration required

Disadvantages

If any events are visible to the public, ALL events are visible. This is because security is controlled at the calendar level. Inflexible rollup capability. The views will be either ALL events or ONE category. For example, you have a college calendar with theater, boys sports, and girls sports. You can view ALL events or you can view theater, boys sports, or girls sports individually. But, you cannot create a SPORTS rollup calendar that would display boys and girls sports combined. Approval Limitations. Approvals are set at the calendar level. With one calendar, an approver could approve any event added to the calendar. Using the college example above and multiple calendars, you could have an Approver for each of the distinct areas. Sync program does not allow selection of events by Event Type. Using the company/department example, you couldn't download all events for one department by themselves. Setup and Teardown Events can't be used. If you're using Event Type for department, then you can't use them for other things. For example, you couldn't assign training as an Event Type and view all training events in the company.

Method

Multiple Calendars

Advantages

Permissions can be used to limit visibility of some calendars. You can have calendars visible to some Users and not visible to others. You can have some calendars the public can see, while other calendars would only be visible to people with logins. Approvers can be set for each calendar. Flexible rollup calendar definition. You can group any set of calendars together for a combined view. You can also create multi-level combined views. For example, you could have a calendar for each state that rolls into a calendar for each region. You can also have a national calendar that includes all states. Control over individual event rollup. For example, the Accounting department is having a picnic. They want it on their calendar but not the corporate calendar. Accounting can set the privacy on the picnic to not roll the event up into the Everything calendar. You can create setup and teardown events. For example, you're having an event in the Gym from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM but the Gym needs to be free for setup 1 hour before and 1 hour afterwards for teardown. You can create a setup and teardown event not visible to the general public that would mark the gym as used for that extra period. Additionally, you can put detailed instructions on how to setup the gym for the event on the setup and teardown event. Using security, you can hide these setup and teardown events so they aren't visible to the public. Sync program can pick specific calendars for download. Event Type can be the actual type of the event, like training. This allows viewing by Event Type so you could see all training events for example.

Disadvantages

Higher license fee. Initially more complex to setup for use.

connectDaily can be run in three ways:

Hosted on our servers.

The hosted version of connectDaily provides a file transfer screen for uploading images, style sheets, etc. This feature is not present in the non-hosted version.

Installed on your servers

Does not contain file transfer screen described above.

Deployed on your servers as an uncompressed WAR file.

This is usually only seen in ISP hosting environments. Does not contain file transfer screen. Some features not available:

• Create Custom Header
• Create Internal Header
• Change Colors doesn't allow custom color selections.
• Enable/Disable IFrame Calendar Widgets in Setup Public Calendar Viewing

You can still have IFrame Calendar widgets, but you have to enable manually copy the files into the WAR file before deploying it.

No. We want you to try out our service and make sure that it meets your needs. You are under no obligation to purchase and you will not be asked for any billing information or automatically billed.

If you decide that it does not meet your needs you don't have to cancel the trial. Your feedback is valuable to us so we would like to know why our software doesn't meet your needs. If you would take the time to EMail us at sales_at_mhsoftware.com, we would greatly appreciate it.

Yes. connectDaily has a comprehensive security system that gives you control over who can see which calendars.

The easiest way to control this is to go to the Setup Public Calendar Viewing screen and use the mover to control what calendars are visible to the public.

To configure this, go to the Setup Public Calendar Viewing screen and check the option for Can the public add events to the calendar?

Once you've done this, you'll still need to add a link to the custom header to give the users a way of adding the events. To do this, go to the Edit Custom Header screen.

See Also: Allowing the Public to Add Events

connectDaily uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control its appearance. With CSS, it is possible to specify in the style sheet the print view appearance.

To try this out, visit our trial site:

http://www.mhsoftware.com/caldemo/

and from your browser's menu, choose PRINT | PREVIEW. Notice that the heading is gone, fonts are scaled down, etc.

The default connectDaily installation uses the open source Apache Derby Database. Nothing else is needed.

If you would like to use a different database, we support MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, and Sybase SQL Anywhere.