User-friendly calendar offers convenience

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Information Technology has taken steps to create a new university calendar for better accommodating people.
Reid Mullen, OIT programmer analyst, said the project of replacing the old text-based calendar took place in early March.
He said the old university calendar has some disadvantages, for example, it could only be viewed by days and has no other links.
“People may find it inconvenient to explore what’s going on around campus when using the old calendar, so it is necessary to develop a user-friendly, Web-based calendar of events that is easy to navigate and simple to use,” Mullen said.
He said the new calendar has several features, which are not available in the old one.
“It allows users to look at all campus events for any given day or week.”
Mullen said in the month or year mode, a user simply clicks on a highlighted date to find out what’s happening that day.
“If a certain day cannot be highlighted, that means there is tentatively no events at that day,” he said.
Some events have linked with other sites, so by clicking on the event, users will obtain more information, such as event location, cost, time and a phone number for additional information, Mullen said.
Some special icons under the calendar will indicate if an event has changed or was canceled.
The new calendar will allow people to easily navigate between two months of calendar entries, which makes it easy for users to browse, he said.
Mullen said a new search engine will help users search for events by department, college or category, including concert, athletic events or exhibit.
He also said there are some banners appearing on top of the calendar that could be linked to upcoming events or some announcement.
“The banners not only can make the calendar colorful but also can be used to promote the events.”
Mullen said events posted on the calendar usually focus on those open to the public and have some attractions to the audience.
“Although everyone can view the calendar, only a certain number of people have the authority to add or edit the events,” he said.
Mullen said a university-wide calendar planning committee, which is made up of 20 representatives from different offices, is responsible for creating events.
“The summer events have already been posted onto the calendar a couple of months ago, but there is still a possibility that new ones will be added and the number of events have no limitation,” he said.
There are two training sessions scheduled during the summer to teach those representatives how to edit and post events onto the new calendar, Mullen said.
Since May, the new calendar has been accessible from
CMU’s home page, at www.cmich.edu.,
by clicking “events.” Or, it can be viewed directly by typing in http://events.cmich.edu.
“This is an on-going project and we hope to add more features onto this new calendar in the future.
“It is important to harness the power of the Internet to help people do their jobs easily and efficiently,” he said.