Reservation Visibility

5 wards share our church building, and historical conflicts over building scheduling led us to heavily utilize the reservation system in the new calendar. It is very useful. However, the major limitation to its use is that unless you are a building scheduler, you can't see which ward has the building and what resources have been reserved. This requires members to blindly attempt to schedule events on what appear to be open days only to be told that there is a conflict. After trying this a couple times, they end up having to contact the building scheduler for available days on which they can schedule the activity. Having to do so returns us to the pre-online-calendar-days (where a building scheduler must constantly be fielding requests from members about available days) which is what I understood the calendar was supposed to fix. I am curious about what others have done to work around this problem, and wonder if anyone knows how soon the church will be rolling out a way for everyone to see the reservations instead of just building schedulers.

I believe this topic was addressed in passing in a thread in the spring of last year (2011), but I thought I'd start a new thread to find out if there is any updated information. Given the posts before and after, I don't believe everyone on the thread fully grasped the issue raised by the poster who mentioned this, but now that more people have had time with the system they may better appreciate the value of everyone being able to see reservations.

It is already possible for everyone who uses the building to see the reservations:

1. Select Week view
2. Under Available Locations, check the box by your building's name
3. You will now see all events scheduled for that building (regardless of which ward scheduled them), as well as all reservations for that building.

It may be helpful to hide your subscribed calendars when you do this so that you don't see other events that take place at places other than the building.

The ability to see reservations in this way was only added in Version 2 of the calendar, which was released in late October 2011. And (in my opinion) it is unfortunate that it is not available in Month view; many people operate mostly in Month view, so they will have no clue that this capability exists. Apparently the feature that displays events and reservations for a selected building consumes many system resources, and the developers were concerned that in Month view this would consume too many resources overall, and also that there would be too many events per day to see reasonably on the Month view.

I concur. I don't know anyone who uses week view. We need to see reservations in month view. At least provide an option/setting to enable this.

Where's the suggestion box?

mawhiteley wrote:Where's the suggestion box?

There are a couple of options:

• Use the Submit Feedback link at the bottom of the main lds.org page.
• Realize that member of the Calendar development team read the posts in this section of the forum, and so your post is already in the "suggestion box."

mawhiteley wrote:I concur. I don't know anyone who uses week view. We need to see reservations in month view. At least provide an option/setting to enable this.

The reason week view is used is there isn't enough display real estate to show all the events and reservations. There are some days now in week view that only the building icon and the display details box icon can be displayed.

Still, I believe the user should decide. Let's have it an option. There is plenty of real estate over the calendars I support. And month view is preferred by most.

mawhiteley wrote:Still, I believe the user should decide. Let's have it an option. There is plenty of real estate over the calendars I support. And month view is preferred by most.

I would like to see the ability to use month view also. But without a significant revamping of the display there are going to be events/reservations that will just not be able to be displayed. How is that going to be handled? I am sure they are not ignoring the desire by many to use the month view. The programmers have to come up with a method to be able to display everything that a user would want displayed. Right now that is not possible with the current screen display implementation.

Adding this to the month view is definitely a priority for us, especially considering the amount of feedback we get on this issue. This is definitely in the top three most requested features. However, the design and implementation of this feature requires significant resources. Currently our very small team is dividing its time between four applications (with more on the way), so while we're working as fast as we can, we appreciate your patience as you use the application with its current feature set.

But thanks for the great feedback. Keep it coming...

Thanks for the update, that helps.

jdcr256 wrote:This is definitely in the top three most requested features.

Can we know what the other two are, so we can stop requesting them?