You can include data from other calendars into a calendar. This allows you to, for example, make department level calendars that roll-up individual calendars. Or, a Master Room calendar could include data from individual conference room calendars. All included data is live; when you change an individual calendar, the group calendar reflects these changes immediately.
The calendar can be viewed in traditional grid format or by month list format. Additionally, the calendar can be viewed in a yearly, weekly and single day format. Each individual viewing the calendar can determine the format that best suites his/her needs. A favorite view is Time Plan.
This is an add on option that allows email to be sent directly from your calendars. The email feature requires iCal to run on NT/2000/XP. Here are the capabilities wrapped around this email option.
iCal supports the iCalendar standard and has been designed to allow data exchange between other iCalendar products like Apple's iCal calendar and Google's calendar. iCal will function as a WebDAV server which allows applications to Publish calendar data directly to the system. This iCalendar Data Exchange page provides details on the workings of this feature.
It is now possible to define custom entry fields for a calendar. Specifying your own Text entry fields and Selection lists will allow you capture your data requirement needs. This could be a check list of items to include for a conference room setup to additional descriptive fields for a performing arts event.
Template files provide a means for describing how your custom fields are to appear on the entry form, popup text, email messages and list view. You can find more details here: custom fields
iCal has been designed to support languages other than English. Custom language files can be easily created. At this time there is support for Danish, German and Dutch in addition to English. We will be adding more languages which will be made available for download.
This provides a matrix view of multiple calendars. Hours of the day horizontally across the top and the list of calendars vertically along the side. Your calendars can represent any resource for allocation. The resources could be anything from conference rooms, lab equipment, office appointment times, racquetball courts etc. The planner view allows you to quickly determine and assign available time slots. For additional information and online demo see: Book Your Tennis Court!
A small navigation calendar that can keep you informed of daily activities. Click on the navigation link at the bottom of the calendar labeled Calendars: Select to bring up a list of available calendars. On this list you will see links to mini which will present you with a small navigation calendar.
This feature will download individual iCal events in iCalendar format. This will cause any iCalendar application to import this event. The Microsoft Outlook calendar is such an application allowing an iCal web calendar event to be moved to Outlook with a single click. Here is how to configure iCal to use this feature.
You can configure any calendar for Tentative Event Submission. If this is enabled, any user with Add permission can add events, but the events won't actually appear on the calendar until they're approved by a privileged user. More can be found on this page: approval details
You can configure any calendar to allow people to sign up for calendar reminders. When enabled any person with View permission to a calendar can subscribe to be reminded in advance of any upcoming event. E.g. An email message can be received an hour before a status meeting. There is also the ability to be notified of any event added or modified on the calendar.
The details of the calendar can be pulled as an RSS Feed.
For levels of calendar password security can be assigned:
Passwords are hierarchical in design. i.e. A password assigned to give Edit access will also give Add and View access.
Each Calendar can be assigned to a Calendar Group. Calendar Groups are used to limit which Calendars can be included and displayed in the Select Calendar list. E.g. This allows you to have a set of calendars for separate company departments, for conference rooms or in any way you might choose to group them.
Calendars can be configured to prevent events from having overlapping times. E.g., you would not be able to add one event that runs from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM and a second that runs from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM. A search feature is available to locate a desired time slot from among multiple calendars.
Easy to use forms allow text to be placed on the calendar. This text can be links to other web pages or to additional pop up window information. Events can be for single day entry, for a duration of days, or for periodic days. Examples of periodic specification include: 1st and 15th of every month, every other week on Tuesday, or the 1st and 3rd Thursday of every month.
You can search the calendar for specific events. The events found during a seach will be the only ones displayed onto the calendar. This effectivly provides a filter of your calendar data. For example, you could locate all reservations for a particular room.
Each Event can be assigned to a Category. Each Category can have default color settings. Categories can be defined System-wide, or just for a particular Calendar. You can filter your view of a calendar to show only those events of a specific category.
Events can occur just once, or you can enter repeating events in a variety of ways. An event can repeat every day, every week, every other week on Tuesdays, the First and Third Saturday and Sunday of Every Other Month, etc. Simple pulldown menus on the event entry form make it easy.
Add in files provide for an easy way to dynamically add special data to your calendars. These are text files located in the folder that holds your calendars. These text files can hold information like moon phases, special holidays, birthday lists, paydays or anything else. For each calendar you choose which of these lists should be populated onto your calendar. There are two possible data formats supported. vCalendar is a calendar data exchange standard supported by many calendar systems. E.g. Apple iCal files. Also supported is IDT File Format which is a very simple easy to construct.
A valid starting and ending date range can be defined for the calendar. This confines the view range to only the months that may be valid for your project, calendar school year, performances etc.
Logging can be enabled to trace and report all calendar activity. The IP address of user requests along with other information is reported. Also there is the ability to restrict iCal access to specified IP addresses.
CSV and Tab delimited files can be imported into your calendars. MS Outlook files are supported. Daily, Periodic and Duration events with all attributes can be specified. The data can be merged with existing calendar data or can replace all existing events. Calendar data can also be exported to CSV and Tab delimited files.
Virtually every display feature of the calendar can be assigned a color through an easy to use interactive setup. Each calendar can have it own assignments. Cascading Style Sheets drive the color selections. Additionally, this allows the creation of color and font schemes for use by multiple calendars in the system. More details can be found here: global color and font schemes.
You can specify font faces and sizes for all aspects of the calendar. This will help to blend your calendars into the look and feel of your web site. Underlying CSS Cascading Style Sheets can be modified to give fine control over the display.
iCal is a dynamic interactive web calendar. However, it is also possible to publish the calendar as a set of static html pages. These pages can then be placed under any web server for purpose of view only.
Customized header and footer text (or images) can be assigned for each calendar.
Dynamic navigation tool bars provide easy movment to other months, to other calendars, alternate views of the calendar data, access to event edit forms and to administration screens.