So I have been given the task of searching out a suitable option to replace our current hand written and copied schedule at work with a new, uptodate version.

So far, I can make an spreadsheet that has everything nice and neat, but I ultimately want to get this thing synced with google or something similar, and editable on the go, and able to be viewed by everyone at work.


All I really need is a simple month by month schedule that I can put in a site and who is working at each site (there are only 2 people per site and 3 possible sites per day). I can't figure out how to do this in google calendars or how to incorporate my existing template into google calendar (even when I save it as a CSV).

I know there has got to be a simple solution to all this, but I can't figure this out. Anyone got some ideas for me? a walk through or tutorial would be awesome to, because I'm ultimately going to have to show this to people who are (surprisingly) less tech-savy than I am

2/14/2012 7:08:52 PM

gugal d0x

2/14/2012 7:27:53 PM

that's where I got the template to make the current "tidy" schedule, but the best I can do with that is share the document with people. I want to make it so people can sync it to their calendar and it will update as I update it (say we need to make a schedule change midway through the month)

2/14/2012 7:34:44 PM

Have you looked into outlook calendars? I think those are easily accessible and editable for people at different sites. We used to use something like that to coordinate all of our field visits and be able to check the calendar on the go, I'll try to remember exactly what it was that we used

Here we go, "share calendars with Microsoft exchange server"

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/share-an-outlook-calendar-with-other-people-HA010354420.aspx

And here's the website with info about the exchange server.

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/en-us/default.aspx

[Edited on February 14, 2012 at 9:16 PM. Reason : Fd]

2/14/2012 9:12:00 PM

But once you do that, is that not the same as me making up the calendar as a google.doc and just sharing it with anyone? or does it have live changes and sync activated? Or am I over thinking the capability of available free technology at this point?

2/14/2012 11:13:16 PM

Use google calendar.

2/15/2012 12:30:30 AM

^^^ Exchange Server costs money, hardware, and requires someone who at least somewhat knows what they're doing to run it -- it seems like they don't have those things if this question is coming to TWW (just speculating). Plus, they can do everything they want for free.

yeah, just use google calendar -- It's very capable of what you want (and more). You can create as many "calendars" as you want with any one account. You can share calendars with other users. You can share calendars with non-google users. You can post the calendar to a website (http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=41207). You can make it so other users can just see the calendar, edit the calendar, or just see that something is scheduled but not the details.

As a user, you can view all of your separate calendars individually, or all at once on a master calendar. In your situation, you could have a separate calendar for each site, each calendar would have it's own color associated with it's entries. So on a master calendar you can quickly identify site 1, site 2, and site 3 based on the color. You can sync them to your phone.

the answer is google calendar if you want simple, free, and something that will sync with google.

[Edited on February 15, 2012 at 1:50 AM. Reason : .]

2/15/2012 1:33:30 AM

^good call, we already had the exchange server set up and running when I started using it way back when, so I have no clue about the particulars of it (cost, labor involved, etc). I just know it worked well to do what hes talking about.

Sounds like google calendar is the ticket

2/16/2012 3:38:03 PM