Time and Place Calendar Publishing Utility
The web is unquestionably a great way to get information out to people, whether they are just persons within your organization or in the public at large. Moreover one of the main pieces of information you need to get out is what events are occurring where -- the schedules that you develop in Time and Place. Wouldn't it be obviously great if Time and Place could publish accurate event calendars directly to your web site? Now it can.
There are many new cutting edge technologies to do database-driven web sites: Java, Active Server Pages, ISAPI, and ActiveX to name just a few. All would have made the Calendar Publishing Utility more expensive to build, more expensive to support, and more expensive for you to administer. (Do you see a pattern here?) They also would have limited, to one extent or other, the range of server or browser versions that could be used.
They also are completely unnecessary.
Event schedules are not stock quotes, airline reservations, or retail sales. An hourly (or in most cases even daily) update is just fine, thank you. Plain HTML with tables will work to display the information and is broadly supported. It will also work on any web server. (For internal use you don't even need a web server. Just make the destination a publicly available directory on the file server and anyone with access to it and a browser can view them.)
Your own page appearance
If your published event schedules don't look like the rest of your web site or correspondence they will appear, in a word, dumb. Be assured that is not the case. The calendar publishing facility inserts the schedule table inside of a page of your own design.
The method for doing this is, as you might guess, simple. Design a new page or make a copy of an existing one you like. Remove all undesired text or elements and put some easily identified text, like "The Calendar Goes Here" in the correct spot and save it. Open the file in a text editor like notepad. Copy all of the text before "The Calendar Goes Here" into a file in the database directory called htmlpre.txt. Copy all of the text after "The Calendar Goes Here" into a file in the database directory called htmlpost.txt. That is it.
You also have considerable control over the content of the published calendar itself. You can choose either a table format or a calendar. You can also control what information appears in the table or calendar for each event.
Your own web organization, range, and privacy
What grouping suits you? Do you want:
One calendar showing everything?
One page for each type of event.?
One page for each organization?
One page for each room?
One page for each person?
Well, you can have it. And how far in the future do you wish to publish? Do you want through the end of tomorrow, the week, the month, next month, or the year? You can have that too. Are there certain events you don't want the entire world to know about? Any event can be marked private in Time and Place to prevent it from being published.
Of course what makes the web a web are links and lots of them. We have kept this in mind.
Every scheduled item (location or equipment) can have a URL associated with it in Time and Place. This could, for example, be a page of information about the room and map as to how to find it. Every time the room is mentioned in the schedule it will be linked to its URL.
Every organization can have a URL associated with it. This might be a page of information describing the organization and what it does. Every time the organization is mentioned it will be linked to its URL.
Every event type can have a URL associated with it. This might be a page describing the general type of event or policies regarding it. Every time the event type is mentioned it will be linked to its URL.
Each contact person can have a URL associated with it. Unlike the others this URL is presumed to be a mailto: link rather than a http: link. Thus every time the person is mentioned it can be clicked on to send them an e-mail message. Or you can explicitly include the http:// in the URL and have them linked to a page containing additional biographical information.
Each individual reservation can have a URL associated with it. This might be a reference to additional information or even an on-line registration system that you might wish to develop
With this wealth of potential links it is possible to have your published event schedule be a central point for informing others about yourself, your people, your activities, your goals, and your accomplishments. (In our opinion it is this, and not spinning logos or singing fish, that makes the web so great.)
More Information
| See how the Calendar Publishing Utility looks and runs | View sample(s) created with the Calendar Publishing Utility | Pricing, ordering and evaluation copies of the Calendar Publishing Utility |