Oracle Calendar Peer Institutions Policies and Procedures
In our efforts to determine what decisions other institutions have made with respect
to calendar policies and best practices, we submitted a number of questions to
the following institutions, all either currently offering or in the process of
offering Oracle Calendaring Services:
California Polytechnic State University – Chris Broome
University of Wisconsin – Madison – Guy Stalnaker
University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill – Stephen
Braswell
Their responses are summarized below.
Who can schedule whom?
CalPoly:
At present, any staff and/or faculty can schedule any other staff and/or faculty.
The scheduled person chooses whether to accept or decline the meeting.
Under OCS, we plan to extend the same service to students, so anyone can schedule
anyone.
A side note: we have about 2,000 students who are FERPA’d. We are meeting
with our Registrar’s office next week to determine how we will have to handle
such students. Some of the plans and statements that follow may need different
processes for such students.
Wisc.:
This question and the one which follows are related. When we decided to purchase
and deploy a campus-wide calendaring system, we first had to decide whether we
wanted a PIM or an interactive scheduling system. Since PIMs are available for
free from Internet web sites like Yahoo and MSN, spending a half million dollars
to duplicate them locally seemed an exorbitant waste of money. So, we chose Steltor's
Corporate Time because it met an extensive list of requirements created by a cross-departmental
team AND it allowed interactive scheduling.
Because interactive scheduling was one of the reasons we got the calendar system
in the first place, it then made sense that we'd set account parameters to take
advantage of this fact. We did this because of our belief (borne out by research)
that most users will not alter the initial application settings, electing in their
ignorance (not in its bad connotation) to simply use the application until such
time as circumstances force them to review those settings.
So, after that long-winded discourse :-) We set **all** accounts such that times-only
are visible for all users and can-invite-me is allowed. We explicitly state this
in our Policies and Procedures and explain our reasoning. Thus far, there have
only been a few, frankly crotchety older professors, who've thrown a fit about
this. We think that the potential for younger professors, staff, and students
to have the option of changing how they interact with the calendar system available
to them worth the abuse.
UNC-CH:
For the past four or so years we have hosted the CS&T/Steltor/Oracle Calendar
for faculty and staff only. We recently deployed a separate server for students
with Oracle Calendar 9.0.4.2 in Collaboration Suite mode (using OID for LDAP).
We plan to migrate our faculty/staff accounts to that server soon and have everyone
on one server.
Anyone can and will be able to schedule anyone and see anyone's calendar. We are
working on policies and documentation on how individuals can restrict their schedules
if they want.
Who can see whose calendar?
CalPoly:
Anyone can see anyone’s calendar, but:
- Certain people (such as senior
management) restrict access through the client-side software settings so that
their calendars are only visible as completely empty schedules.
- We will be setting defaults for
Confidential and Personal entries as either ‘View times only’
or ‘No viewing rights’ for the general population.
Wisc:
See above:
UNC-CH:
See above
Who do you see (by default) when you search
for someone?
CalPoly:
By default you will see their name, with their ‘Public’ and ‘Normal’
entries.
Wisc:
Now, this is different. We CANNOT restrict the visibility of anyone who has a
calendar account in the present version of CorpTime 54 that we have in production.
It's simply not possible. At the very least only a name is visible depending on
how you map directory attributes. We know that this violates FERPA guidelines
as implemented on our campus, but there's simply nothing we can do about it at
this time, it's either deny them a calendar account entirely, or tell them that
at the most their name is visible in the system, but nothing else is.
Thus, to answer your question directly, by default everyone is available and can
be found by a search. The key of course is not whether they can be found, but
what can be seen in their agenda once they are found. If their access rights are
set such that nothing is visible, then all that the searcher will see is a blank
agenda with nothing in it.
UNC-CH:
By default, you can see times only. Individuals have to go change that option
if they want it different.
Everyone is available by search. We have some individuals that restrict their
directory information. If they do not want people to be able to search for them
in our regular electronic directory, we do not allow them to get an account at
all. It looks like a later patch might allow some individual restrictions on information
but it may not do what I think it does.
Do you pre-populate student calendars with
their class schedules?
CalPoly:
Not in place or planned at this time. This is under consideration as a future
project phase. We currently use CollegeNet’s Resource25 product for class
scheduling and will be looking at downloading Resource25 data into Oracle calendar
after OCS is implemented. We also use BlackBoard, with some similar and complimentary
features.
The group handling capabilities of Oracle Calendar are not very comprehensive
at this time and would make implementation of class lists a major sub-project.
Wisc:
We do not. We thought at first to populate all agenda with the campus Academic
Schedule, but even that was vetoed. What we did was create a campus events import/subscription
process that allows students to manually subscribe to things like athletic events
(football schedule, their class schedule, etc.).
UNC-CH:
We don't pre-populate this information. We have a programmer that is working on
a sort-of "opt-in" piece where students can go to a web page, log in, and add
their class schedules. A second phase of that would include the academic schedule,
sports schedules, etc. The only thing we add for everyone is University holidays.
Do instructors populate student calendars
with tests, exams, etc?
CalPoly:
No. This may be a future enhancement to be integrated with Resource25 and/or BlackBoard,
as in the question above.
Wisc:
We are actively working on this in two facets. One is to allow faculty and instructors
a method to import into their agendas their teaching schedule, and the other is
a mechanism that will allow them to make their class syllabi available for students
to import into their agendas. The first is complicated by the available data we
have in our data systems. The second is complicated by devising a mechanism using
which syllabi information can be formatted correctly for importing. We have the
delivery method (the event importing system mentioned above), we just need to
work out the data part of things--always the most problematic.
UNC-CH:
No. We have just released our student calendar service about two months ago. We
are only beginning with class schedules and the academic calendar.
Who can block whom?
CalPoly:
Anyone can block anyone. However, it might not be wise to block your manager/dean/department
chair (etc) from seeing your public and normal calendar entries.
Wisc:
Anyone can block anyone--that's how the access rights of CorpTime work.
UNC-CH:
Anyone can block anyone--that's how the access rights of CorpTime work.
At what point in the account process is
the calendar account created?
CalPoly:
At present, calendar accounts are created for Faculty/Staff when the Human Resources
feed submits them as new employees.
Student assistant and resource accounts are created manually, via a request form.
Wisc:
We set it up so that when new students, faculty, and staff activate their NetID,
this process gets them access to a campus-maintained dial-in pool, the UW portal,
Mail, and Calendar systems.
UNC-CH:
Other than email, all extra services our department provides that are tied to
a user ID require the customer to go to a web page and request to be "subscribed"
to the extra service. This includes calendar, web space, personal cgi access,
Oracle accounts for individuals, and research computing services.
When are calendar accounts removed?
CalPoly:
This varies:
- Regular employee calendars are
deleted when the H.R. feed indicates they have left the university.
- People leaving with Emeritus status
have their calendars deleted manually when they leave the campus. Emeritus
retain e-mail accounts, but not calendars.
- Student assistants have their
calendar account deleted when they leave the university, or they lose their
assistant status (whichever happens first).
- Emergency deletions and resource
deletions are handled manually.
Wisc:
Twice a year following defined procedures inactive NetIDs are identified, then
the service accounts are destroyed after a minimal wait period.
UNC-CH:
Our deletion process for non user ID and email services is a bit...lacking. As
I get time, I plan to set up an automated procedure that scans the expired users
list and removes those accounts, which likely won't happen until after the person
is gone for at least two months. In the meantime, this is a manual process.
We don't plan on providing this service to alumni. Our Alumni Association provides
an email forwarding service and other similar services to alumni. Our organization's
scope is focused to active students and employees.
Are folks allowed to opt-out of using the
calendar system?
CalPoly:
No – they get (or will get in OCS) an account. However, whether they
use it or not is up to them. A substantial number of our faculty don’t use
their accounts today, so their calendars appear to be empty.
Some departments use the calendar very heavily for scheduling meetings and people
are quite religious about posting their unavailable time. Others can be
quite lax.
Wisc:
If you mean are they given the option of refusing the creation of a calendar account,
then no. But there's nothing, of course, that mandates that they MUST use their
calendar unless that comes from within their department or from colleagues. In
fact, though we currently have some 70,000 created and thus 'active' accounts,
use is only at about 5-10% of that total. We're working on a 'build it and they
will come' model :-)
UNC-CH:
Our users are opted-out at user ID creation. We don't require them to subscribe
or use the service.
Additional information and online policies/resources:
CalPoly:
Cal Poly has been using the Oracle Calendar on HP Servers since about 1997 –
it was originally HP OpenTime, Steltor then acquired the product and named it
CorporateTime. Oracle later bought out Steltor and named it Oracle Calendar.
We currently have a project underway (Project PolyComm) to migrate from the above
HP-based calendar and HP OpenMail to Oracle Collaboration Suite, which will run
on clusters of Dell/LINUX servers.
Our present calendar implementation only provides calendar accounts for staff
& faculty – no students, except those student assistants who need them.
We have about 2,600 calendar accounts, including about 400 student assistants.
When we move to OCS in the fall, we will give calendar accounts to everyone. This
will add about 22,500 student accounts. We plan to have staff & faculty on
one calendar node and students on one or more other calendar nodes.
Please see the ‘Policies’ link at:
for information on policies we have in place.
Wisc:
UNC-CH:
Web site...yeah. Not really. We inherited this service from our sister IT organization
almost two years ago and are still working on getting policies and documentation
together. We've been working more to get things going internally than getting
the documentation done. I hope to correct this issue soon.
Here is the little that we do have:
Note: calendar.unc.edu = faculty/staff calendar service, schedule.unc.edu = student
calendar service, and they eventually will be combined.
Back
to Oracle Calendar Policy Steering Committee page
Last
Updated 7/30/04 nlil