I’ve mentioned this via the listserve before, but it bears repeating to make sure everyone knows you have this option. Our new Crimson Calendar (http://events.ua.edu), which was relaunched in February, has the ability to house unlimited individual calendars for colleges, divisions, departments, etc. We launched with the base five calendars which all feed into the main one (Academics, Campus Life, Crimson Arts, Lectures, Workshops), and since then we’ve had a few groups request to add their own individual calendar (Arts & Sciences, Communication, CTL, etc.). That was the idea of this calendar – to provide a central calendar that anyone can utilize to meet their individual needs, and as a result, the overall calendar becomes more representative of the campus as a whole.
So what’s the advantage to using it? Well, the software and server support is central, so all you’d have to do is be an administrator of the calendar – no setup, no maintenance. You’d just handle administering the entry of events to the end-users in your area, to the degree appropriate for your group. The calendar also features several advanced features, including RSS feeds for each calendar, the ability to subscribe to calendars and receive email updates of new/changed events, the ability to download individual events as .ICS files or an overall calendar as a .CSV, etc, etc. And you’d have your own calendar URL that you can link to directly from your site, instead of having to redirect to the overall calendar. And, you’d have placement of your events on the overall Crimson Calendar at http://events.ua.edu.
Over the years we’ve all faced the question of how to best promote events for our organizations… static pages? Custom homegrown calendar app? Vendor product? The Crimson Calendar was centrally procured to provide a one-stop shop for colleges, divisions, and departments to be able to easily and cheaply host their own events calendar, with minimal extra effort. And the more groups utilize the calendar, the better our quality of information for the central calendar will be, as all of the individual calendars feed into our “official events calendar” for the campus. (By the way, our product is EMS Master Calendar by Dean Evans & Associates)
So what does it take? A phone call (8-2440) or email to me, a $295 flat one-time fee per calendar, and a yearly $45 licensing fee in year two and beyond. That’s it. Let me know if you’re interested or have questions.
What’s the $295 yearly fee cover?
Sorry, what’s the $295 one-time fee cover?
It just adds the new calendar to the base package. We made an initial purchase of the software with a set number of calendars, and each additional added to the base just has a one-time license fee to be created. So think of it as a license to add new functionality to the base.
This is excellent stuff! You should submit a link on StudentUP.com to share your content, get it rated and reach a larger audience. Thanks for sharing. Cheers!
Andy, were there any open-source options you considered?
We’re in the process of moving our users over to Gmail, and one of the benefits is the shared calendaring. Since Google has an open API for its services, it’s very simple to display calendars in whatever front-end manner you want. For instance:
http://mba.cba.ua.edu/students/calendar
This is a very simple graphical calendar for our MBA program. The backend is managed by all the MBA staff from within their Gmail accounts.
Best of all, it’s free.
Yes, we looked at a few different options. But in the end we elected to go with a vendor product for several reasons. One, the setup was minimal because it’s a “product” per se, so that it could be deployed across campus with no additional setup needed for many groups. Two, the full range of features offered by the calendar (RSS, subscriptions, downloadable events and email reminders, etc) were far more than anything else I saw. And three, the flexibility of features combined with simple look was pretty attractive. It was centrally-procured as an enterprise-wide product, and has been well-received and worked well.