Mobile Calendar Usage

First of all, I would like to say bravo for all the work done to bring our church up to speed for web. Very impressive.

Here's my issue:

I have an iPhone 4. I am the ward executive secretary. Whenever I need to make an appointment for bishop, I add it to my iCal in my phone, on the spot. My mobileMe account then syncs that event across my devices, and bishop also sees these events because he has subscribed to that calendar.

Unfortunately, this solution seems buggy; sometimes it worked great, other times he couldn't get updates.

If our lds site could subscribe to an iCal calendar, then I could create events from my phone, and it would push live to all other leaders and their mobile devices could view these events.

Am I correct? Or is there a way to make this happen already? From what I can see, the only syncing available is to send all calendars one-way from the site to a third party such as iCal. Although this is convenient, I think the real value comes from the ability to create and view events, on the go, from mobile to mobile, via subscription calendars.

Great idea, but I'm guessing that there will be an issue with verification for adding events to the calendar when pushed from mobile to online LDS. The only alternative for this arrangement seems to be to create a Google (or iCal) calendar that is shared among the various people. That takes it outside lds.org, but does allow for total mobile integration.

Here are two options (among others) that currently exist.

1a. Create a private ward calendar at lds.org for the bishop's appointments.
1b. As needed, add appointments directly to that calendar from your iPhone/iPad using Safari to log in to the private ward calendar at lds.org.
1c. Use the calendar sync option on the private ward calendar for you and the bishop to subscribe to the calendar and have it show up in your iPhones, iPads, Google Calendar, etc.

Known issues:
1b is cumbersome and not iPhone friendly at this time.
1c is currently not working for all users consistently at this time. You and/or the bishop might be one of the unlucky ones until it gets fixed.


2a. Create a private ward calendar at lds.org for the bishop's appointments.
2b. Enter the appointments in the calendar app on your iPhone.
2c. Sync those appointments with iCal on your Mac, and then export them from iCal to a file.
2d. Sign in the the private ward calendar on lds.org you created in step 2a and import the iCal export file you created in step 2c.
2e. Use the calendar sync option on the private ward calendar for the bishop to subscribe to the calendar and have it show up in his iPhone, iPad, Google Calendar, etc.

Known issues:
2c & 2d are substanially cumbersome and result in a significant loss of timeliness.
Import of files in step 2d is still being refined and might produce inconsistent results.
2e is currently not working for all users consistently at this time. The bishop might be one of the unlucky ones until it gets fixed.

I can't speak specifically for the iPhone app but my understanding is that Android and iPhone development are moving in the same direction on the LDS Tools app to include calendars and make it possible to update them for all subscribed members to the calendars to see.

As we have been told officially, the new unit calendars on LDS.org are still being worked on and will not be in full use until 2012. LDS Tools for Android will be working hard in the first half of 2011 to integrate the calendar function into the app and make it possible to update the calendars, either as an editor or just a viewer. Editors would have the ability to directly change the calendar while viewers could submit items to be included that would have to be aproved by the calendar administrator.

I'm sorry I don't have answers for you right now but there is light on the horizon.

tortdog wrote:The only alternative for this arrangement seems to be to create a Google (or iCal) calendar that is shared among the various people. That takes it outside lds.org, but does allow for total mobile integration.

We do this now, but even Google has trouble keeping things in sync, although for the most part it does very well.

We do this in our ward quite well using google apps. Not that google apps is necessary, it is just that we have a google apps account anyway and not every bishopric member has a gmail account to use a google calendar.

So here is what we do:

1) ensure each bishopric member either has a gmail/google calendar account where they don't mind having their calendar shared (or just create an additional calendar layer for them that they share), or if you set up a google apps account you will also have by default a google apps (gmail/google calendar account) for each user in the Bishopric.

2) have each Bishopric member share their calendar or selected calendar layer with the executive secretary.

3) ensure each Bishopric member has set up the respective calendar to display and sync with their selected mobile device

4) executive secretary adds appointments to the calendar's of the respective Bishopric members and viola! each member receives appointments to their mobile devices.

It works wonderfully and our executive secretary is far more efficient because of it!