Stake-wide access for building schedulers and stake leaders

As stake clerk, I have assigned myself and one assistant stake clerk the role of building scheduler in addition to having a building scheduler for each of our three buildings. It is frustrating that we can not see all of the ward events scheduled for the particular building assigned. When an auxiliary leader desires to schedule an activity, the best we can do is walk them through the steps to schedule it themselves. We can not verify, nor can we modify if we do resolve a conflict between wards or between auxiliaries in a single ward. It appears the best we can do is block out (restrict) a time period on a date and wait for the ward to input their activity information. This is not helpful--actually, I find it useless.

What is the rationale for having ward events that the stake leaders can not see, and stake events that the wards can see but can not modify? Why have a "Stake Event - YSA Ward" and a "YSA Ward" event? What is the difference from the developers perspective?

When completing the annual stake history, a stake calendar is requested to be included. When printing this out, the only events that will be presented are those for the stake and my own home ward. I can not present all of the activities across the stake because of this restriction. Must we print ten calendars to get all of the events (WITH MANY DUPLICATES) that take place over the course of the year?

Should we change the calling to "building schedule referee" instead of "building scheduler"?

Please don't respond with "that's the way it's coded"... These scheduling and viewing rights should be assignable, and managed on a stake level, as needed.

For more discussion, feel free to email me at davereidy@cox.net.

Best regards,
Dave Reidy
--Programming since 1967

djreidy wrote:What is the rationale for having ward events that the stake leaders can not see,

No idea. There is a need for that. My guess is it may be a outgrowth of privacy.

djreidy wrote:and stake events that the wards can see but can not modify?

Wards should not be modifying stake events.

djreidy wrote:Why have a "Stake Event - YSA Ward" and a "YSA Ward" event?

Easy work around. Grant the designated leader in the YSA Ward rights to edit the Stake-YSA calendar. It will have to be by name, not by calling, but that would work.

Keep in mind from a development level, there are only calendars. The calendar system as shipped was completely blank. Any calendars you see where created by someone, who thought it was the best arrangement at the time. All the system knows is if it's a stake calendar or a ward calendar and who the editors are. As such, there's no way to treat YSA any differently than any other calendar.

djreidy wrote:Should we change the calling to "building schedule referee" instead of "building scheduler"?

I believe we've talked about that in other threads. Keep in mind the old way of doing things was done that way because of the limitation that only one person could have a completely up-to-date authoritative calendar. Thanks to the web, the server can now hold that. The old way was due to technical limitation, not because it was gospel.

djreidy wrote:It is frustrating that we can not see all of the ward events scheduled for the particular building assigned.

But you can see all the ward events scheduled for a building. The trick is to go to Week View and select the particular location. See "Check Location Availability" in the help system under Scheduling Events.

djreidy wrote:When an auxiliary leader desires to schedule an activity, the best we can do is walk them through the steps to schedule it themselves.

And that's a good thing. First of all, it helps them learn how to schedule activities. Then they can do it in the future with no further interaction from anyone else. Second, it puts the event on the correct ward's calendar, so that ward members who are interested in that calendar can see the event, sync it to their mobile device, etc.

djreidy wrote:We can not verify, nor can we modify if we do resolve a conflict between wards or between auxiliaries in a single ward.

Actually, since you have the building scheduler role, you can make changes to events scheduled at a building if that is necessary to resolve conflicts between wards. As for conflicts within a ward, I'd say that the ward should work it out, with no involvement from stake personnel.

djreidy wrote:It appears the best we can do is block out (restrict) a time period on a date and wait for the ward to input their activity information. This is not helpful--actually, I find it useless.

The restrictions are of limited usefulness. For multi-ward buildings, they help to enforce recurring priority rules (e.g., Ward A gets the Cultural Hall on 1st and 3rd Wednesdays), but they should be avoided in most cases for particular dates -- for a particular date, the appropriate unit should simply schedule the event.

djreidy wrote:What is the rationale for having ward events that the stake leaders can not see, and stake events that the wards can see but can not modify?

As a stake clerk, I certainly don't want wards to modify stake events. And I don't need to see ward events as a general rule. In those rare occasions where I want to see ward events as I'm scheduling an event, the Week View technique I described at the beginning of this post is adequate.

djreidy wrote:When completing the annual stake history, a stake calendar is requested to be included. When printing this out, the only events that will be presented are those for the stake and my own home ward. I can not present all of the activities across the stake because of this restriction. Must we print ten calendars to get all of the events (WITH MANY DUPLICATES) that take place over the course of the year?

The stake annual history consists of a stake history, and one history per ward. What we do in our stake for calendars results in a nice clean calendar for each ward and the stake. Each ward prints a calendar of just their events. They hide all the stake calendars before printing, so that they see only their ward's events. Then they include that with their ward history; the annual history instructions recommend that each ward do this. Then at the stake level, I hide my ward's calendars before printing the stake calendar. That gives me just the stake events, which I then include in the stake history. Doing it this way results in readable calendars with no duplicates. Even if you could include the events from all 10 wards along with the stake, I would think that the calendar would be cluttered with so many events that it would be quite unreadable.

aebrown wrote:Even if you could include the events from all 10 wards along with the stake, I would think that the calendar would be cluttered with so many events that it would be quite unreadable.

Not to mention making it hard to see what unit did what.

aebrown wrote:The stake annual history consists of a stake history, and one history per ward. What we do in our stake for calendars results in a nice clean calendar for each ward and the stake. Each ward prints a calendar of just their events. They hide all the stake calendars before printing, so that they see only their ward's events.

I sent detailed instructions to each ward clerk on how to hide all general and stake calendars, subscribe to and display all ward calendars, and print their 2013 annual calendar. I don't believe a single one of my 11 clerks could do it correctly. I have to admit it is a complicated interface, but I think most clerks should be able to do as Alan suggests above.

I am a stake clerk and recently noticed that I can now subscribe to all the ward calendars in our stake. This is great -- it will be a significant help in scheduling stake events!

The only place I've seen mention of this is in the release notes for LDS Tools version 2.3.0 (https://www.lds.org/callings/melchizede ... ifications) which says "Added the ability for authorized stake leaders to view and subscribe to all ward calendars in their stake."

Two questions:

1. Which stake leaders are able to view and subscribe to all ward calendars in their stake?

2. Will there eventually be a way to tell in the calendar display the unit a subscribed calendar belongs to? I subscribed to the "Ward Activities" calendar for each ward in our stake and found that some of our wards have a two or three character abbreviation of their ward name at the beginning of each of their calendars, and that makes it very easy to tell the ward that the calendar is for. I'm wondering if that's something we we should be instructing all our wards to do or if a system feature will address this any time soon.

This is great! Works for stake assistant clerks. Hopefully it will also work for high councilors, who request this most often.

sbradshaw wrote:Works for stake assistant clerks.

It doesn't seem to work for Stake Technology Specialists.

Maybe I am slow this morning, but I don't see any need for this feature. Stake leaders could already see all events in all meetinghouses using the Weekly view. Granted, we could only see events that used meetinghouse resources, but nothing that used "Other" locations.

Also, why would a stake leader need to create events on a ward calendar?

drepouille wrote:Maybe I am slow this morning, but I don't see any need for this feature. Stake leaders could already see all events in all meetinghouses using the Weekly view. Granted, we could only see events that used meetinghouse resources, but nothing that used "Other" locations.

I wonder myself. Yes, as you mentioned, there can be calendar events that aren't in a meetinghouse, but those are certainly the exception. To see those few additional events, I have to work through a very clunky interface. To see what a ward is doing, I have to subscribe to all of its calendars. To see what every ward is doing, I have to subscribe to dozens of calendars. But I don't want to subscribe to all those calendars; on the occasions when I want to know what one or more wards are doing, I have to subscribe to a lot of calendars and then unsubscribe when I'm done.

I'd much prefer a feature that didn't require subscription -- I'd just like to be able to select a ward (or wards, perhaps using a set of checkboxes) on the main calendar view, and see all their events. The current implementation is so tedious that I really doubt that I'll ever use it.

drepouille wrote:Also, why would a stake leader need to create events on a ward calendar?

The feature that was recently implemented gives no access to allowing stake leaders to create events on ward calendars -- it simply allows stake leaders to subscribe to ward calendars. Ward calendar administrators still have no option for designating anyone outside their ward as a editor for a ward calendar (or as an administrator), so stake leaders still have no ability to create events on a ward calendar.

I can almost see a high councilor assigned to a ward wanting to keep abreast of all the current events in that ward. He could possibly subscribed to all the calendars in his assigned ward. Or he could just attend their meetings and read their bulletin announcements.

If, for example, a Stake Primary President wanted to monitor the activities of all the ward and branch Primary organizations in her stake, I suppose she could subscribe to all the Primary calendars in the stake. However, as I noted in another thread, many wards are using a single ward calendar, rather than separate calendars for each auxiliary and quorum.

drepouille wrote:I can almost see a high councilor assigned to a ward wanting to keep abreast of all the current events in that ward. He could possibly subscribed to all the calendars in his assigned ward.

This is the request we receive from our high councilors all the time, for the wards they're assigned to. Our high councilors are very involved in the (YSA) wards.