I have been asked on a number of occasions is it possible to have a group or office shared calendar. The problem is generally those people who are used to using Outlook in a business context have used an Exchange Server which managed all of the calendaring functions for you. In a charity situation, particularly a small regional one, it is not very likely that your charity uses a Microsoft Exchange server. The calendar management needs to be handled at a central point such as a server.
I received a request about a group calendar a few days ago and did some digging and have come up with a solution. So if you are interested in having an office calendaring system that is online, that your volunteers and office staff can log into then this may be for you.
Web Calendar
Within the hosting we are using we have access to a lot of additional software should we choose to use it. None of it is supported by the hosting company, so the general rule is you are on your own when you start to use it. WordPress is just one of many packages available.
I found and installed Web Calendar which is one of the packages we have available. After a few problems which have now been resolved this is what can be built for your charity in a separate location to your main website.
A calendaring system where there are three classes of user; a “user” an administrator and an assistant (or PA). Each has a login to the system. Each depending on the permissions set up can add things to their personal calendar, and to other people’s calendars. Where you add something to someone elses calendar it can send an email to them to advise them.
There are several views of the calendar that can be set up. A day view, a week view and a month view. You can also define the group you are looking at as well if you want to see multiple calendars together.
The system is independent of your website, although it is easy to create a link to it from a members area to the website. It is also private or public as you wish depending on what you want to do with it.
Is this an events calendar?
This is quite different to the Events Calendar I have included in some WordPress installations for marketing purposes. In this case this is very much aimed at a private internal calendar shared with staff and volunteers who have the appropriate login credentials. It is particularly valuable if you have a distributed team, some of which you cannot reach or speak to on a regular basis.
If you need events advertised on your website there are different ways to do that.
Is it secure?
If you want one of these I will install it on a SSL (Secure Socket Layer) site, where access is through https:// As with all security it is largely down to you to ensure that people use strong passwords. A website that is accessed over SSL has all of the transactions encrypted so a third party cannot intercept them.
As a result of making this change it will also place your site on an https:// address.
Interested?
If you are interested in learning more I can set up one, and grant you access to it in one of my staging areas so you can assess it for your organisation. Let me know if you would like to kick the tyres to find out if this is for you.