Calendars

[THaines]

I'm currently looking into the way we use calendars and am interested to know what others currently use for staff/parent calendars?

We used to have our main staff calendar in a giant word document which used to get printed at the beginning of the year for every person and then printed various times throughout the year as and when it changed. We decided to move this onto the Frog calendar, scrapping all paper copies, and this has gone down fairly well.

With regards to a parent calendar on our website, we currently just have a PDF document, containing a table listing all the main events. When anything is changed, I'm just sent a new version and I upload it. We also have an 'Upcoming Events' bit on our main page which I manually amend, adding/removing events etc.

We're now getting a new website and I'm trying to think of a way to streamline this. The FrogLearn calendar can't be exported therefore I'm looking to transfer everything to either an Office 365 calendar or Google calendar. What I'd really like is one calendar, with the option to label things as either 'Staff' (only visible to staff), 'Parents' (only visible to parents) or 'Both' (visible to both) therefore removing the need to have multiple calendars and having to replicate workload across different calendars/documents. The only way I can see this working at the moment is to have a Google Calendar with two calendars within it but then any events that both staff and parents needed to see would have to add to each calendar individually, therefore doubling the workload.

Does anyone know of any or use a good system that works well?

Edited December 1, 2016 by THaines

[c.hammond]

Hi Tom,

We've been using multiple Google calendars for exactly this purpose for sometime now, I think we actually have 6 different ones that I pull together in different ways for displays on Frog or our display screens. I've not come across a system that would allow this to be run from a single calendar unfortunately.

[clangstaff]

@THaines we are an Office 365 school so have gone down this route.

We have a member of staff who updates a single staff only calendar, any events on this calendar can then be shared with another account on creation. We have another account set up for parents and the wider public.

This works great as all office 365 users automatically have the school calendar added to their account but we can also share the calendars we want to with whoever we want to without duplicating events. In theory you could do this with as many calendars as you liked, having another for students, sporting events and so on.

My only negative for this system is that Office 365 is very limited when it comes to customisation of the look of a calendar when showing this publicly (to users that aren't logged in). A solution would be to import the calendar in to a Google account which gives you some further options for customisation. I'm still not massively happy with the look of the Google calendar embeds but without a public web server this has it's limitations.