Can't see locations

I see what you are talking about using the >>, but none of our locations are listed even though I am a backup scheduler for all of them (Asst Stake Clerk). It has the Locations section, the arrow is pointing down (expanded the section) and I can see the Restrictions and Show headers but no locations. I can see the locations listed under the Locations & Rooms option in the gear menu, so do I need to do something special to get them to show up in the calendar view?

Go Gear icon > Locations and Rooms > Select a location

For each location, under Location Notes, make sure "This location can be scheduled by Wards and Stakes" appears. If it doesn't, Click "Edit" > Make sure "This location can be scheduled by Wards and Stakes" is checked.

We don't want the wards to be able to schedule the locations, but we do want to be able to see the restrictions. It seems that a building scheduler should be able to see restrictions whether or not the location is enabled for scheduling yet.

Probably an unfortunate side effect of streamlining restrictions into the main calendar. I let the developers know, but I have no idea how long it will take to fix.

Thanks. I have enabled scheduling so we can see what is there. Hopefully no one will try to grab a location before we can make sure all restrictions are correct. We can always have the scheduler override it, but easier not to let it happen in the first place.

Another one that might be good to let the developers know about... If I schedule an event when the location is not open to Wards/Stakes, it seems to properly assign the resources, but when then I look at the event summary in the calendar, the location is blank. It lists the rooms but not the actual building name. If I turn on scheduling then the location is visible. Again, even if scheduling is not available to the units, I would think that someone looking at an event with an assigned location should be able to see the information about the location.

Thanks,
Rick

Just had another question... Is it possible to assign multiple locations to a single event? I did a quick search of the forum, but didn't see any applicable results. For example, our stake calendar has "mutual" listed on Wednesday evening and it occurs at all 4 buildings in the stake. Up until now, we have been maintaining separate reservation calendars for each building in addition to the normal stake calendar, so we end up with 5 events for mutual. If we could assign all 4 buildings as the location for the main stake calendar event, then we could have a single event instead of needing 5 of them (or at a minimum 4 if we had a mutual event for each building). As I am playing more with the new calendar I am liking the update, so just trying to understand how we can best use it in our stake.

Thanks again,
Rick

rickk wrote:We don't want the wards to be able to schedule the locations, but we do want to be able to see the restrictions. It seems that a building scheduler should be able to see restrictions whether or not the location is enabled for scheduling yet.

That sounds odd, unless you are doing a lot of work in advance of letting the wards do their own scheduling. The only purpose for restrictions is to constrain how the wards schedule buildings. But if you're not letting the wards schedule buildings, there's no good reason that I can think of for using restrictions. The building scheduler would be better off just creating events.

You did use the word "yet", so perhaps you are working towards opening up the scheduling to the wards in the near future. If that's the case, I'd recommend that you open it up sooner rather than later. There will be pain in the transition, but it's just something you have to work through. If you're moving towards the distributed model for scheduling, hanging on to the old centralized model longer than is necessary will just make it harder. That's my 2 cents, anyway.

rickk wrote:Just had another question... Is it possible to assign multiple locations to a single event?

No. An event (or a restriction) can only be assigned to one location.

In my experience, it's very rare to have an event at multiple locations. Your example of "mutual" at 4 locations, isn't really a single event.

rickk wrote:If we could assign all 4 buildings as the location for the main stake calendar event, then we could have a single event instead of needing 5 of them (or at a minimum 4 if we had a mutual event for each building). As I am playing more with the new calendar I am liking the update, so just trying to understand how we can best use it in our stake.

It sounds like you are totally focused on how to book the building using the calendar system, which is certainly one significant benefit of the online Calendar system.

But you're ignoring all the benefits of using the calendar as a means of communicating what events are happening. You can only get those full benefits by distributing the scheduling, putting ward events on ward calendars (which can only be done by ward calendar editors and administrators). Putting all events on a stake calendar, even if they apply only to wards, makes for a very busy calendar that no one (except perhaps stake admins and building schedulers) would ever want to see in LDS Tools or sync to their personal calendars, or even see online at LDS.org.

Yes - I said "yet" because we have been using central scheduling and are not sure if we are ready to switch - so I left it open...

Previously you could assign rooms with restrictions but not events unless you were using distributed scheduling. So some of our building schedulers were using restrictions as a way to track the scheduled uses. Now with the locations available to schedulers (at least it looks that way) even when we haven't enabled the wards/stakes to schedule, I agree that events make much more sense. We just needed to get the info from the previous restrictions onto the calendar as events so we don't lose them.

aebrown wrote: It sounds like you are totally focused on how to book the building using the calendar system, which is certainly one significant benefit of the online Calendar system.

But you're ignoring all the benefits of using the calendar as a means of communicating what events are happening. You can only get those full benefits by distributing the scheduling, putting ward events on ward calendars (which can only be done by ward calendar editors and administrators). Putting all events on a stake calendar, even if they apply only to wards, makes for a very busy calendar that no one (except perhaps stake admins and building schedulers) would ever want to see in LDS Tools or sync to their personal calendars, or even see online at LDS.org.

No - not totally focused on building scheduling. We have broken the stake calendar into a number of individual calendars that can be independently subscribed to, and these are used to communicate the events of the various stake organizations. Mutual is on the youth calendar more to make sure that we don't have anyone scheduling stake conflicts over the top of it than to communicate what is happening that night. Those details would be on the ward calendar. We also have a reservation calendar for each building that only the building schedulers can modify. Most people won't subscribe to this, but it allows us to track and view building usage on a single calendar for those that care. We have ward calendars which list events at the ward level. I don't agree that distributing scheduling is required to get most of the benefit of the online calendar - there are lots of other good things that we have seen even though we are still using central scheduling. Our stake presidency has asked that we stick with central scheduling for the time being, so that is what we are doing.

rickk wrote:I don't agree that distributing scheduling is required to get most of the benefit of the online calendar

I think at minimum, you have to distribute it to the ward level to get the most out of it. And building scheduling by in large should be attached to the event, not on a separate calendar. Otherwise you end up with issues trying to keep them in sync.