Alec Flett wrote:
> But anyhow, what struck me was that Julie needs to subscribe to Ted's
office calendar.. that seems somewhat broken.
Instead, Ted needs to decide, for himself, which of the events on the
office calendar are actually part of his daily activities, and somehow
incorporate those into his personal calendar. But honestly I'm not sure
how close we are with Chandler here, probably because I don't understand
the intended workflow. When Julie goes to find free time on Ted's
calendar, she may or may not see all of the events on his personal
calendar, but in any case she can see free/busy, and can thus find out
when he's free.
Ted can do this today. He could subscribe to office calendar, making
sure that it is considered "not mine". He could then drag all events he
did consider "his" into "all my items" (or any other "mine" collection).
Ted could then share "all my items" with Julie, or share some other
"mine" calendar with Julie. This is the beauty of one event living in
two places. ;)
Further, she shouldn't NEED to subscribe to his calendar to see
free/busy information. I'm imagining the nightmare the sidebar would
become if I needed to subscribe to the calendars of the other 20 people
at osaf just to schedule a meeting with them!
Yup, that breaks with some # of people, or the case where you are
looking at free-busy information of certain people infrequently enough
that it feels wrong to have them in the sidebar.
There are some cases where that works out though. We've seen a pattern
with some organizations that we talk to where people pick times based on
seeing the calendars of the 1-5 most busy people. OSAF is kinda like
that, actually -- I can do a pretty good job of scheduling most meetings
just knowing the common recurring meetings (the office calendar) and
Mitch's schedule. I get by pretty well without having all engineers'
schedules handy.
Obviously this is demonstrating the value of a good Free/Busy
implementation but I think the other thing at least I need to understand
is the relationship between shared and personal calendars, how that
relates to Free/Busy, etc.
And then finally, lets say Julie finds time on Ted's calendar.. how does
she actually indicate to ted that she wants to get together? Does she
put the event on ted's calendar for the next time he syncs on his end?
Does she put it on hers and tell him to go add it to his? Here we get to
the value of invitations...
Perhaps she tells him in person, or sends him an email.
If I think of myself and my spouse, we could go pretty far sharing each
others calendars, or maintaining a shared family calendar -- I'd just
put something on his calendar and we'd talk about it when we saw each
other. Or, I might be on the phone talking to him *while* I was putting
the event on his calendar.
I'm also perfectly comfortable with my spouse seeing my whole calendar. ;)
Another technique that I might use would be to create a calendar, say
"work", that has all of the events that I am willing to share with
coworkers. I might modify my behavior in some cases where I didn't put
detail in it if I didn't want the whole office to know -- that would be
fine for me personally.
So is there a workflow where you can have invitations without free/busy,
or one where free/busy is useful without invitations?
Lisa described a situation with invitations -- she and two colleagues
were on the phone (or skype or irc) discussing when to meet. They picked
times while talking to each other, then one sent out the iMIP
invitations (that go directly onto your calendar) -- making it more
likely that they'd all remember to actually put it on their calendars. ;)
In this case, no one is getting the value of using the information from
existing calendars, but still some value is resulting from *just* the
invitations.
I'm not saying that free-busy and invitations aren't useful in lots of
contexts, but I can totally see getting some value in the small office
and family settings with only one feature (either one). I can also see
that in some cases just shared read-write calendars would be very
helpful -- no free busy or invitations.
Perhaps two key factors in some of these scenarios: (1) small group of
people and (2) informal, trusted relationships between people. As Mitch
pointed out in a recent conversation, once you have the formal
hierarchical relationships that exist in a big organization, the issues
around who can see what information and who can put what on who's
calendar become very important -- full free/busy and invitation workflow
is important in that case.
Cheers,
Katie
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