Campus Calendars, Revisited
It’s been several months since we’ve talked about plans for the campus calendar. Rest assured, it is still on our plates and still a priority. Unfortunately the realities of our office often force us to put projects on hold while we address other issues.
Because it has been so long since we addressed the calendar issue, I felt it best to start from the beginning and reexamine the major calendaring systems. These are nicely summarized on a uwebd discussion board so I will only give a brief explanation of those that didn’t make our final cut.
First, the commercial products…
Active Data Calendar (Active Data Exchange)
It is probably the leader among commercial products, but dealing with other departments on campus using commercial products makes us a little gun-shy. Being commercial there is also little opportunity to customize functionality to add what is lacking.
Trumba Connect
This is a hosted solution, which we are really not interested in so it was immediately rejected.
CollegeNET R25 WebViewer
Even the person who originally suggested this product on the mailing list was rather weak in his endorsement. We therefore only took a quick look, but the cosmetic appearance of the examples we found weren’t up to what we want to present as representing Texas A&M.
Open source products will be reviewed in my next post.
I’ve talked to a lot of R25 users at HighEdWeb, and they universally loathe it.