Ok, got your point and thanks for the explanation. :) Max Am 11.08.2009 um 18:47 schrieb Stroller:
On 11 Aug 2009, at 10:02, maxbobzien@mac.com wrote:
This is maybe a stupid question, but why would you do that?
Uh, lots of reasons.
For my understanding, you set up the server in a specific environment, for example your office.
From my understanding, adding additional calendars is a basic part of calendaring functionality. Surely all calendaring servers should have this.
And every employee has it's own office calendar, where all his entries are stored. So why would you want an additional calendar?
Typically, each user might wish to have a "work" and "home" calendar.
A consultant who works out of two hospitals might wish to have separate calendars for each one, so that the appointments show in different colours in iCal client. Thus he would have a total of 3 calendars, including home. That would also allow him to delegate work calendars separately to a different administrator at each hospital - the admin staff would subscribe to all three of his calendars, but appointments allocated to the "home" calendar or the calendar of the other hospital would show simply as "busy" with no details shown; the admin assistant at each hospital would only see full appointment details (patient name, ward number, notes, other attendees &c) for events in the calendar pertaining only to their own hospital.
The consultant might decide to host a medical convention, and thus wish to create a separate calendar for that - in this case there are a bunch of reasons it should be separate from his private calendars. For a start, he might be organising events for this convention that he might not have time to attend himself - he may have an appointment with sales reps for a pharmaceutical company whilst another doctor is speaking in hall 2 - and thus having the convention's schedule all mixed up with his private one would only cause confusion. Furthermore, he will want to export the calendar or host it so that attendees can see the details of each convention event, but not his own private schedule. Anyone should be able to subscribe to this calendar, but no-one else should be able to add events (whereas his assistant should be able to add events to his main work calendar(s) and his wife should be able to add to his home calendar).
This is not a bunch of contrived examples. The receptionist may wish to create a new calendar for the meeting room or for another shared resource - one should be able to subscribe to its calendar & see when the meeting room is free without having to phone the receptionist to find out (most of the time managers will wish to hide this calendar in iCal client by unticking the box next to its name, but it is always available to them instantly). Busy receptionists, like everyone else, are glad of tasks they can delegate & automate.
If we make calendars a resource which must be "deployed" by IT, we inhibit their flexibility. If we give users the power to create & control, then they'll find their own ways to use them to get their jobs done better. This encourages users to actively use calendaring, creates a stronger organisational culture surrounding it and there are fewer "i didn't put that in my calendar because... " excuses.
I'm actually just a n00b on this mailing list - I've been subscribed a long time, but I haven't yet deployed iCal server. I basically just want it to synchronise my own diary between my desktop & my laptop, and maybe to allow a secretarial service to add appointments in the future. So I hope other list members will forgive & correct errors or omissions. However, this kind of use I've described seems "obvious" to me.
I was nicotine deprived when I originally posted and read your "why would you do that?" as a criticism of the previous poster; reviewing it, I now interpret your post as a genuine request for clarity ("this is may be a stupid question" is phrasing that I would use myself if I really didn't understand something). Apologies if my first two paragraphs seem blunt.
Stroller.