Institutional Events Calendar

Webster is implementing Ad Astra as well to go live next month for classroom scheduling.  We will then rollout conference room & event planning as phase II & III.

I think a bigger question than which tool should you use for supporting an events calendar is the question of exactly what is the intended mission of the tool. If you really want a tool that’s just an events calendar tool, there are several fairly low cost and high quality tools available. But if you want a more comprehensive tool for scheduling events and facilities, then your list of possible tools might look very different and might be a good bit more expensive.

Pellissippi State used Active Data Calendar as our events calendaring tool for many years, and I would highly recommend it if all you need is an events calendaring tool. However, we just switched to using R25 as our tool for events calendaring. The reason for the switch is that R25 is a comprehensive tool that does much more than events calendaring. It schedules events and facilities and resources. It can schedule conference rooms, classrooms, theaters – any facilities really such as parking lots and hallways and dining rooms, etc. It can schedule resources such as security, housekeeping,  audio-visual support, and public relations support. One of the R25 capabilities is called Web publishing, and R25’s Web publishing feature made Active Data Calendar redundant.

Jerry

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jerry Bryan • Vice President of Information Services • Pellissippi State • 10915 Hardin Valley Road • P.O. Box 22990 • Knoxville, TN 37933-0990

Voice: 865 539-7127 •  Fax: 865 539-7653 •  E-mail: jbryan@pstcc.edu

Ø  Union College has been using R25 as a resource management system for years and our Communications & Marketing unit used Active Data Calendar for PR for events.  Neither system talked to each other so we did an evaluation and are now in the middle of transitioning to 25Live which adds the web publishing piece to our current R25 system to allow one system to both manage resources and PR.  Active Data Calendar will be decommissioned once this transition is complete.

I thought it might be worth adding the following comments in light of Union College’s very enlightening experience.

When Pellissippi State initiated our R25 project, we were very open to continuing the use of Active Data Calendar in parallel with R25 and we were also very open to decommissioning Active Data Calendar and using R25 for everything. We really didn’t know at the beginning which approach would best meet our needs. In the end, it was our Marketing and Communications unit (not part of IT) which made the decision to use R25 to populate the college’s Web facing calendar and to decommission Active Data Calendar. R25 also provides our Marketing and Communications unit with the information they need for press releases, advertising, and the like.

There have been few if any major technical challenges in the project, but there have been some cultural challenges. In particular, Marketing and Communications for years had used a Web based form on our intranet called the “Promote Your Event” form to collect needed information from all our departments. The departments now enter their event promotion information into R25 along with all their other event information. For some reason, it’s been very difficult to get all the departments to enter their event data correctly into R25. For example, an academic department might be having an event to have some K-12 students on campus, and all they will do will be to schedule the room. They often will not enter the information into R25 needed to publish the event to the college’s calendar or to inform Security that there will be minors on campus, that sort of thing. And if an event is not published to the college’s calendar, then offices such as the Information Center are not able to provide directions or information when they receive phone calls. A follow-up project will be touch screen directional kiosks at the entrance to many buildings, and again much of the information will need to be fed to the kiosks from R25 and there will be nothing to feed if the departments do not enter the needed information. So we are training and retraining and retraining again.

I use the term “R25” generically, but like Union College (and as a brand new R25 customer) we are exposing our users only to 25Live. R25 is a client that has to be installed on user PC’s, and 25Live provides the R25 functionality through a Web browser.

Jerry

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jerry Bryan • Vice President of Information Services • Pellissippi State • 10915 Hardin Valley Road • P.O. Box 22990 • Knoxville, TN 37933-0990

Voice: 865 539-7127 •  Fax: 865 539-7653 •  E-mail: jbryan@pstcc.edu

Good morning!

At Virginia State, we are using EMS for event scheduling and are in the process of integrating It with our Banner ERP. This tool also has a piece for integration with Outlook.  While the latter is not perfect, it is certainly a great asset for booking meeting rooms on campus beyond the Outlook interface.

In the past, I have worked with schools that ultimately selected Ad Astra and R25. The decisions were largely swayed on timing. If one of them just released a new version of their product, it typically launched them ahead of the other.

Good luck in your search!

Best regards,

Art

Arthur J. Fridrich

Technology Services

Virginia State University

1 Hayden Drive

Petersburg, VA 23806

Tel.: (804) 524-3194

Email: afridrich@vsu.edu

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pub/arthur-fridrich/3/9a6/502

From: The EDUCAUSE CIO Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:CIO@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of Matthews, Rick
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2012 4:46 PM
To: CIO@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [CIO] Institutional Events Calendar

I am eager to hear more about this topic.  Our university will soon go live with Ad Astra as a room scheduling solution integrated with Banner. Our goal is not event calendaring, but simply greater ease of scheduling rooms for classes and better utilization of our existing rooms. Adoption was driven by our Registrar's office.