Out with the old and in with the new (calendar, that is)

After over ten years of dedicated service to Mizzou, we bid farewell to the old events calendar last week and welcomed aboard a shiny new calendar with lots of bells and whistles.

The new calendar offers several new improvements over the old calendar:

• Event submitters can now add, modify, cancel, reschedule and delete their own events.
• Visitors to the calendar can elect to receive an e-mail or text-message reminder before an event.
• The "Add to My Calendar" features makes it easy for calendar visitors to add the event to their personal calendars in either iCal or vCal format.
• Visitors can e-mail events to up to five friends.
• A nifty syndication feature makes it possible for calendar managers to place event feeds on their department Web sites so that they only need to enter an event once.

There are also several other features that we haven't rolled out just yet but hope to as soon as we've had an opportunity to review them more carefully and develop campuswide implementation plans for each.

Configuring the new calendar was fairly straight forward and really only took a matter of a few weeks. The whole process included everything from adding the Mizzou brand and customizing the look and feel of the calendar to establishing a plan for distributing access to our campus departments and developing a user guide and training outline for staff.

The roll-out process also involved developing the event categories for the calendar. Our goal was to develop a list of categories that was comprehensive without being extremely long and made sense to our users. This involved taking a good cross sample of campus events and then sorting them into event types (lectures, meetings, sports, arts and culture, ceremonies, etc.). Once the basic categories were established, our team got together for a game of "devil's advocate" or "where-would-I-find-this." This helped identify a few missing categories (such as "sales").

So far the new calendar has been well-received on campus, and we'll continue to make small changes as we get more feedback this semester. Thanks to all the dedicated Mizozu staff who have really pitched in by posting their events to the calendar before students return on Monday!