Calendaring
From MissionTechWiki
Contents |
Shared Calendaring
Shared Calendaring is the ability for someone to create a calendar with their meetings and schedule on it, and share it for others to view.
Why use it
Calendaring helps coordinate schedules for administrators as well as individual missionaries. It can allow donors to see what their missionaries are up to on a day-to-day basis, and it can help people locate where missionaries are supposed to be during a crisis.
Locally Shared Calendars
Many missions use calendaring only within their LAN (Or on their intranet). This means that the data remains fairly localized within the mission. Many products do local calendaring, like Outlook with Exchange.
Internet Shared Calendars
Using Google Calendars, Yahoo Calendars, and a small host of other services, you can post your calendar to the Internet. This allows many people to link to your calendar and see what you are up to. The Internet standard protocol for this is called ICalendar
Security Issues
It can be fairly disasterous for some missionaries schedules to be too well known. So one needs to be very careful when posting calendaring information. Individual calendar entries might say something like, meeting with missionary Fred, could endanger not only the calendar holder but also the individuals mentioned at the meeting.
Google Calendar has fairly good user-based security that allows you to choose which users can have access to your data. But, it is still stored outside the organization and you never know who has access within the Google corporation.
links to tools
Individual Calendaring
There are a number of tools that do calendaring for an individual, just to keep one's life organized. Some of these are able to interact with other calendaring tools so you can see other people's schedules at the same time as yours.