Calendar Improvements

[manoj]

All,

I am looking for improvement suggestions around the calendering functionality in Sugar. This is a pretty vast area and hence would like to understand the extend we should go to build and integrated Calendar.

Looking for specific inputs on the integration and calendar standards out there.

Thanks

[jfuller70]

Improvements:

1) Shared Month View
2) Project Tasks Appear on calendar
3) Re-Occurring appoints or tasks
4) Nice printable calendar (maybe pdf)
5) Ability to tuen on and off times for task/appointments when viewed on calendar
6) use ical unstead of vcal format
7) Add company logo to printed calendar


These are a few of the things we are looking for.

Thanks

[Angel]

You might want to post some bullet points about what's coming in 5.0 in order to eliminate some redundancy, but here are some items that come to mind:

1. Ability to schedule recurring activities
e.g. Every Monday, every X days, etc.

2. Ability to subscribe to iCalendars
e.g. It is nice to be able to publish, would be nicer to be able to read as well.

3. Group scheduling
e.g. Schedule a call for all contacts in a saved search or campaign target list. Would be extremely helpful for telemarketing/telesales operations.

4. Activity categories
e.g. Need the ability to easily organize and distinguish sales calls from personal or other types of calls, or for that matter, calls that related to different products/services one might offer.

5. I dont' understand why the duration minutes value has to be a validated value. In my opinion, this should be a free form text field, like the hours. The way it is right now, you are either inflating someone's time or you need to define a very long list of possible values. In the case of the former, it skews your analytics.

6. Ability to define one's start/end time on graphical calendar.

7. Highlight the current day's row in the week view

8. Color code different user rows in the shared view. Would make it much easier to read and distinguish the break points from one user to the next.

That's it for now, but I'll post any other items that might come to mind.

[manoj]

Hi,

We are NOT making any enhancements to the Calendar module in 5.0. This is scheduled for 5.5/6.0 time frame.

Thanks
Manoj

[Angel]

OK, thanks for the insight.

[longreach]

As you say - a wide area.

There are the various Sync and integration issues, and then the issues around the calendar display itself - in various modes, and how one can merge looking at a representation of a calendar with greatly improved usability of adding activities to it.

One key aspect that I believe should be part of the solution is to have various types of data mapped onto the calendar (probably both in weekly and monthly views) - project data, resource load data, company events, my data, other people's data, tasks due, meetings, calls, etc - and to be able to select via controls which of these classes of data are to be visible at any given time. To be able to filter by Team or Department or Individual whose data is presented on a Company View is very useful as well.

Then we get into booking resources for meetings, like rooms and projectors etc... and then wanting to see the virtual 'Meeting Room' reservation book - as one type of data mapped onto the calendar.

[ruchida]

Hi Manoj,

These are my requests;

1. Ability to assign a team(s) to a meeting
2. Multiple 'layers" of calendar - personal, team (department), corporation, account (account's event, holiday)
3. Integration with Projects' time line

[kbrill]

5. I dont' understand why the duration minutes value has to be a validated value. In my opinion, this should be a free form text field, like the hours. The way it is right now, you are either inflating someone's time or you need to define a very long list of possible values. In the case of the former, it skews your analytics.

I agree with all your points but this one. I am not sure why you would set it to 7 minutes or 43 minutes anyway. Having it set to 15 minute increments makes it easy to plot on a calendar or gantt type chart. A 7 minute meeting means that the calendar must have a granularity of 1 minute and that makes it hard to read.

10 minute increments are the smallest that make any sence and I would thing thats why outlook or any other calendar program uses increments. I think outlook sticks to 30 minute increments.

[kbrill]

Make it so that the week can start on Sunday OR monday.

[tarik187]

Hi guys,

what about the possility to mark meetings, calls or tasks as private for the invited users.
none-invited users will see, in the shared view of the calendar, only the subject and the
time but it isn't linked to the detailview.

regards,
tarik187