Group Calendars and Salesforce

Does your organization maintain an online group calendar?  Most of us use a personal or office scheduling program and/or PDA to manage our own calendars, be it Microsoft Outlook, iCal for Mac, Google Calendar, or a more specialized system such as Salesforce.com.

In certain cases, however, your group or organization might want a separate calendar that doesn’t belong to a single person.  In this post, I’ll discuss a few reasons to use a group calendar, then tell a bit about the group calendaring available to organizations using Salesforce. 

Reasons to Use a Group Calendar

What are the “use cases” for group calendars? Here a few:

• Your organization puts on public events in the community and want to refer to the schedule.
• You run a theater and need to refer to the upcoming shows.
• You rent your facility and need a calendar of upcoming rentals.
• Your project has critical milestones and you want a single place for staff to find them.

 Mulituser Calendar vs. Group Calendar

A brief digression: Most calendar applications allow you to superimpose one user’s calendar over others in a “multiuser” view. While this is a very useful feature for discovering people’s availability, it is not what I mean by a group calendar, in particular because personal calendars are cluttered with all our meetings and dentist appointments. A group calendar should manage an independent set of events.

By contrast, there are several ways to support a group calendar. Some systems (such as Microsoft Exchange) allow you to create a special user or mailbox - not really a person. Others (such as Google Calendar) can have any number of separate calendars that you can view independently or overlay on top of your own calendar. Salesforce, by contrast, has separate Public or Resource calendars for this purpose.

Group Calendars in Salesforce

 If your organization uses Salesforce, you have an opportunity to manage group calendars there using the same calendaring interface you use for your own calendar of events.  However, the feature is not all that easy to find.

To set up a group calendar:

1. Click Setup | Customize | Activities | Public Calendars and Resources | New.
2. Type a name for your calendar, check Active, and click Save.
   Next, you’ll make your calendar available to the other Salesforce users.
3. Click Sharing.
4. Click Add, move ”All Internal Users” (or specific users or groups, as appropriate) to the Share With List, select “Full Access” (or the appropriate access level) in the Calendar Access box, and click Save.
5. Repeat step 4 to add other sharing rules for the calendar, as appropriate.

To view a group calendar:

1. Click the Home tab, and then click the 31 button under the little calendar to the right of your activities list.
2. At the top of the calendar, click Change.
3. In the Search Within box, select Public Calendars & Resources.
4. Click the name of your group calendar.

As you can see, the calendar is not very easy to find. Fortunately, its URL is static. You can bookmark the calendar in your web browser and forward the link to other Salesforce users, or better yet, create a “Useful Link” to it on the Salesforce home page sidebar so that everyone will be able to find it.