School Calendars

[timbo343]

At the moment we use word to create a school calendar which has information about staff who are out, meetings, etc, save it to PDF and place it on the network. I would like to try and bring this process in to the modern era by having a webbased calendar for school events so staff can easily look at it and our general admin team can easily up date it.

 

We don't use sharepoint, O365 or GAFE so i'm open to alternatives. We need something that can be viewable from inside our school but not viewable as a public calendar from outside unless we have some kinda of password that will allow us to do this.

 

I was thinking of a self hosted web based calendar that can be exported/published to an internal web page so staff can see this. I'm having trouble finding a self hosted calendar and was wondering if anyone can help me out.

 

On the back of this, I have created a google calendar for our website which is great for parents to see however a google calendar isn't going to work for the staff purpose as we don't want our staff school calendar to be out there for anyone to see.

 

Thanks

[unixman_again]

We do what you do. On our intranet, (Joomla based) we have the https://www.jevents.net/ plugin, which is an excellent calendar but they would rather use the rubbish pdf route 'cus they can use excel to maintain the calendar which they see as being more user friendly. Basically the person who maintains the calendar can't be a***d to learn a better system.

[elsiegee40]

We were the same with a paper diary in the office. It drove the Head nuts. She wanted a diary online that she could access from her phone. However she was convinced that we needed to stay with EasyMail

 

As a short term solution, I created gmail accounts for the schoolname, head and bursar and calendars for each and let them try it.

 

The secretary hated it, but the head, bursar and everyone using the school calendar loved it... and thus we moved to GAFE.

[timbo343]

We do what you do. On our intranet, (Joomla based) we have the https://www.jevents.net/ plugin, which is an excellent calendar but they would rather use the rubbish pdf route 'cus they can use excel to maintain the calendar which they see as being more user friendly. Basically the person who maintains the calendar can't be a***d to learn a better system.

 

Thanks, will take a look at this. I thought it was just us that did it the "hard" way. We dont have a joomla site, just a box standard html page for our intranet

[truebluesteve]

We do what you do. On our intranet, (Joomla based) we have the https://www.jevents.net/ plugin, which is an excellent calendar but they would rather use the rubbish pdf route 'cus they can use excel to maintain the calendar which they see as being more user friendly. Basically the person who maintains the calendar can't be a***d to learn a better system.

 

Same here - its so frustrating!

[timbo343]

We were the same with a paper diary in the office. It drove the Head nuts. She wanted a diary online that she could access from her phone. However she was convinced that we needed to stay with EasyMail

 

As a short term solution, I created gmail accounts for the schoolname, head and bursar and calendars for each and let them try it.

 

The secretary hated it, but the head, bursar and everyone using the school calendar loved it... and thus we moved to GAFE.

 

How do you get away with the items in the calendar not been search-able in google? This is something that put me off using the google calendar and looking for something intranet based so no one on the outside can see it.

[timbo343]

@webman do you know of anything that might help me in this situation? Something like your classroom booking system would be ideal.

[TechMonkey]

Costs but the SOCS system looks good, their website doesn't do it justice.

[CyberNerd]

How do you get away with the items in the calendar not been search-able in google? This is something that put me off using the google calendar and looking for something intranet based so no one on the outside can see it.

 

I can say how we do it:

We setup separate calendars for various things. Ones that are prefixed WEB are globally searchable and others are private and just shared with teachers.

Combined, the calendars make up the whole school diary: So some people can choose to turn off calendars that are not relevant to them. The web calendar is a combination of all the globally accessible calendars and are edited by different people; so somebody with lettings responsibility edits that one, and somebody with parent eve responsibility edits that. The HT just sees a united calendar.

[elsiegee40]

How do you get away with the items in the calendar not been search-able in google? This is something that put me off using the google calendar and looking for something intranet based so no one on the outside can see it.

 

Not sure I understand you? It hasn't been a problem. It's searchable from the calendar in a browser or within the calendar app

Edited February 12, 2016 by elsiegee40

[Danp]

We have a shared calendar in Outlook (local exchange), everything is added into that and exported to for review etc when needed. This also links into our Parent Portal

[timbo343]

Not sure I understand you? It hasn't been a problem. It's searchable from the calendar in a browser or within the calendar app

 

When i set up the calendar, i was a bit taken back by the " If this website is searchable, people can find your calendar in search results." https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37083?hl=en&ref_topic=3417970.

 

Also when i create a calendar it says:

Make this calendar public Learn more

This calendar will appear in public Google search results.

 

Obviously this school (Staff) calendar needs to be private so i dont want the whole world to see it. I thought by having it on google and making it public everyone can see it. Wouldn't we need to make it public as we dont use GAFE? unless there is a way to publish the calendar to an Intranet without making it public?

[CyberNerd]

@timbo343 ^ see my post above

[elsiegee40]

The general school calendar was public. It replaced the word document that was cobbled together at the start of each academic year and was never correct. This was sent out to parents

 

The head only shared her diary with the school secretary (who owned the public calendar) and the bursar and (who did the same)

 

Like I said , this was a half way house. As soon as the Head realised what we were missing, GAFE came in. Once you have that and everyone's on gmail for their email calendar visibility is really easy to control so we then had a staff calendar that all staff could access as well.

[dhicks]

At the moment we use word to create a school calendar which has information about staff who are out, meetings, etc, save it to PDF and place it on the network.

 

Where is that data currently held - in Exchange or some other email server, or in your school's MIS, or written on assorted bits of paper? We export from Exchange to an iCalendar (.ics) file which then then be imported into various applications, in our case into our VLE. .ics files don't have to be public, you can place them behind whatever security you like, so if you can get access to your existing data somehow and write it to a .ics file that might be your best option.

[timbo343]

I can say how we do it:

We setup separate calendars for various things. Ones that are prefixed WEB are globally searchable and others are private and just shared with teachers.

Combined, the calendars make up the whole school diary: So some people can choose to turn off calendars that are not relevant to them. The web calendar is a combination of all the globally accessible calendars and are edited by different people; so somebody with lettings responsibility edits that one, and somebody with parent eve responsibility edits that. The HT just sees a united calendar.

 

So how are you doing this? Do you use GAFE?

 

Where is that data currently held - in Exchange or some other email server, or in your school's MIS, or written on assorted bits of paper? We export from Exchange to an iCalendar (.ics) file which then then be imported into various applications, in our case into our VLE. .ics files don't have to be public, you can place them behind whatever security you like, so if you can get access to your existing data somehow and write it to a .ics file that might be your best option.

 

At the moment it's on a word document and then saved to a network share as a pdf.

[CyberNerd]

So how are you doing this? Do you use GAFE?

 

We do, but you can pick and chose services - just calendars if you need to .

[timbo343]

Instead of replying to everyone individually, i thought i would update to where i am with this...

 

For some reason, i cannot find any calendars i like. or get them to do what i what them to do.

 

What i am after is:

- A self hosted calendar that can be embedded or shown in a webpage with Read-only access OR a hosted calendar that is only seen by the editor and shareable/embeddable via a link only. That way, we can use the calendar on our Intranet site without anyone else looking at it

 

- It needs to be coloured

 

- I have found that if we try to use google calendars, it does what we want however the stumbling block is.. making the calendar public - if i make it public and save the settings i get "WARNING: Making your calendar public will make all events visible to the world including via google search. Are you sure?" This is something i dont want to happen.

 

I see there is a Private address for the calendar. I think this would be ideal as i dont have to make the calendar public however i cannot get the link to embed.

 

I need the private HTML link that they have removed!! FFS google!

Edited February 12, 2016 by timbo343

[timbo343]

Here is google removing the private HTML link which is what i need (and others too) https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/calendar/q4HfsgVVgsY

[CyberNerd]

Calendar Settings > Edit shared settings > untick "make public"

[timbo343]

Calendar Settings > Edit shared settings > untick "make public"

 

ok, now what am i supposed to do? i need all non GAFE employees to see this calendar on an Intranet page. By doing that we cannot see the events as it makes the calendar private.

[CyberNerd]

ok, now what am i supposed to do? i need all non GAFE employees to see this calendar on an Intranet page. By doing that we cannot see the events as it makes the calendar private.

 

Give the non-GAFE employees GAFE accounts, it's free and will take you all of 10 minutes to sort out. It also means you can put the intranet ont he internet for access at home.

[timbo343]

Give the non-GAFE employees GAFE accounts, it's free and will take you all of 10 minutes to sort out. It also means you can put the intranet ont he internet for access at home.

 

But it's another account for staff to use - this isn't what i want. I want something that they can briefly look at without logging in to something.

[elsiegee40]

You can sync GAFE with AD logins. It's not another account to remember

https://support.google.com/a/answer/106368?hl=en

[CyberNerd]

You can sync GAFE with AD logins. It's not another account to remember

https://support.google.com/a/answer/106368?hl=en

 

And once you've signed in once per machine, it will remember you anyway.