Information Technology

Calendar Alternatives

Useful links:

  • Office 365 Basics – How to find and add a Conference Room Calendar to your calendar view
  • Conference Room Calendar list – list of current Conference Room Calendars

Calendars can be great for scheduling, notifying, and organizing. But not all calendars are the same and people can use the same calendar very differently. Below is a list of different types of calendars and some uses to better clarify your options. The options have been broken out into two groups, a sampling of options available outside the Office 365 environment and the options available within Office 365.

Outside the Office 365 environment:

While staying inside the Office 365 environment can be handy, sometimes that’s not the best solution to your particular issue. Some calendaring solutions can be more flexible or specialized than the calendar options in Office 365. While you would be giving up the integration you could be gaining a great deal from a third party calendar.

Trumba Event Calendar

UW: https://itconnect.uw.edu/connect/uw-event-calendar/
UWB: /website/calendar

Trumba is a calendaring system for all campus public events and departmental calendars (including academic, schools, colleges, and other groups). Meant for public posting of events, it is versatile and can be embedded into your webpage.

Google Calendar

https://apps.google.com/learning-center/products/calendar/#/list

Google Calendar has many useful features, if you often work within the google app environment this can be a handy integration. If you mostly work within Office 365 there will be some integrations features you are giving up compared to Office 365 calendars, but sometimes the Google Calendar features are well worth it..

Other 3rd party applications

While there may be a cost ( from “free” all the way to “expensive” ) A 3rd party application could be useful in more than a calendaring capacity. There are some software solutions that have been created to specifically address certain scheduling needs. Contact UWB IT for more information on 3rd party application options.

Within the Office 365 environment:

Microsoft calendars operate mostly by email invites, you invite others to an event you create on your personal calendar, and you notify those attendees via email updates you send when you edit the event on your personal calendar.

Default Calendar

The default calendar on your Office 365 account is the default location for your appointment invites. It’s important to point out this calendar is the main one you use every day and is different than most of the other calendars below.

Secondary Calendars

We have found that creating secondary calendars in Office 365 ithey are unreliable when used collaboratively. We would advise against trying to add other editors to your secondary calendars.

Conference Room Calendars

Resource Calendars are a special resource that UWB IT requests from UW IT Seattle. This service is limited to conference rooms that are open for anyone to reserve as laid out in the Conference Room Policy found on the Conference Rooms information page.