Importing Resource Calendars to the new LDS.org Calendar System

I'm in the process of importing calendar events from the classic to the new lds.org calendar system. However, there seems to be no way to import resource (building) calendars. Does anyone know if it's possible and how to go about doing that?

ASpaugh wrote:I'm in the process of importing calendar events from the classic to the new lds.org calendar system. However, there seems to be no way to import resource (building) calendars. Does anyone know if it's possible and how to go about doing that?

I don't think you want to do that, even if it were possible. With the classic calendar, the resource and event calendars were separate, but had tremendous overlap, since most events had resources, and most resource reservations were associated with events. Under the new calendar, these functions are combined so that a single event reserves the resources. If you were to try to import a resource calendar, the vast majority of the events would then be duplicated -- one new event for the classic event, and one new event for the classic resource reservation.

You must realize that without an import function years of future reservations will have to be manually inputted month by month into the new system!

fothfamily wrote:You must realize that without an import function years of future reservations will have to be manually inputted month by month into the new system!

No, I don't realize that at all. My earlier post was based on actual experience. I input less than 10 reservations from the old system manually. All the others were either associated with an event (in which case an import from the resource calendar would result in a duplicate event), or was done as a set of individual events (where the new repeating event functionality is so much better), or needed to be quite different. In any case, all new events that reserve resources have to be connected to new resources. So there really is no use for such an import capability.

fothfamily wrote:You must realize that without an import function years of future reservations will have to be manually inputted month by month into the new system!

Isn't that wonderful?! That makes the process of reserving resources more equitable and associated with events.

You can import events into the new calendar and I recommend you use events and not reservations. Reservations does not protect you from yourself or another building scheduler from placing a conflicting event.

We migrated from the classic calendar to the new calendar earlier this year. We too had individual calendars for each building. For the sake of migration, we created new stake calendars for each of those building calendars and imported each classic into the new calendar. We also created one additional new calendar called "Stake Resource Calendar" which would hold all non-ward based events i.e. receptions, family dinners, etc... After the import of each classic building calendar to the new building calendar, we had to go through each of the building calendars and add the location/room assignments and them move them to the "stake resource calendar". We were fortunate that our old process provided all the detailed reservation information (ward, event, contact info, building, room) in the description. Moving them to the resource calendar helped to keep track of where we were at in the migration as events were moved from building calendar to resource calendar. When the building calendar was empty, we deleted it and the migration was done.

Prior to the v2 release, building schedulers were able to create or move events to any ward calendar. It was very handy to have that ability and we were able to take a lot of events off the stake resource calendar and place them where they belong on the ward calendar. With v2, that ability has been removed. It was definitively a great feature that hopefully will be restored at some point in the future. My guess is that it won't, but one can hope!

Once migrated, we (stake building schedulers and clerks) made a concerted effort to train ward leaders so they fully understood what changes were coming. We met with bishoprics, clerks/exec sec and event trained ward councils on how they could schedule building resources using the new calendar. Some embraced it fully. Some didn't and still struggle to grasp the distributed concept, event when the church itself has produced videos and documentation that outline the benefits of the new system.

The new calendar isn't perfect. I will say that as a stake building scheduler, my call/email volume has been reduced significantly. I find myself being more of a coordinator rather than a scheduler. The scheduling responsibility has been pushed down to the wards, where it should be.

Hope this has helped. Good luck in your migration. It may be painful at first, but the sooner you make the change, the better off you will be in the long run.

Thank you for your response dshepher.
Unfortunately I am just a lowly building coordinator with out the privileges to do any kind of importation. I will inform our stake administrator and hopefully he will be able to take care of this and set up a calendar or reservation system we can use. Again thank you for your response.