November 5, 2001 New online calendar system saving time across campus By Peter McMillan and Louise Donahue Arranging meetings and coordinating schedules is getting easier on campus, as more people use the new CruzTime online calendar service. "I think it's more efficient and more productive. It's a very useful tool. I love it." --Lisa M. Rose, director of Materiel Management Started as a pilot project in the Humanities Division and the School of Engineering a year and a half ago, CruzTime was made available to the rest of the campus community in late May and has really taken off in recent months. "It seems as if more and more people are using it every day," said Lisa M. Rose, director of Materiel Management, who began using the system in late July. CruzTime automates personal calendar management and meeting scheduling for faculty and staff, while helping departments manage and share resources such as conference rooms and projectors. The focus of CruzTime is on personal calendars rather than classroom scheduling or event scheduling, each of which has support systems already in place. Using the system, anyone planning a meeting can quickly check to see when others are available to meet, saving time on e-mails, phone calls, and rescheduling, if necessary. With CruzTime, once a good time is found, an e-mail is automatically sent to potential participants. The system is also helpful for keeping track of vacation schedules. "I think it's more efficient and more productive. It's a very useful tool," said Rose. I love it. It's painful to remember how it was before." CruzTime also includes a feature that can be set to remind the user before before a meeting begins. Those wanting to put personal or family events on the calendar can mark that information confidential, so others can't access it, said Dan Snodgrass, director of Computing for the Humanities Division. Snodgrass said many people synch the information with a Palm electronic organizer, so the calendar can be accessed at meetings or while away from the office. Rose said she had planned to get a Palm, but has found it works fine for her to simply print out the calendar and bring it to meetings. Phase I of the project is nearly completed, with user accounts created for some 1,200 academic support staff. Participants can be found in nearly every division, including Arts, Business and Administrative Services, Engineering, Humanities, Graduate, Library, Natural Sciences, Social Science, Student Affairs, and University Relations. Snodgrass said the main resistance to the system has come from people thinking "it's just one more thing to learn," but said he has found very little training is required. "This is one of those programs you can throw on people's computers and they can use it without much training," he said. Training is helpful, Snodgrass said, in learning the finer points of the system, though. The campus computer coordinators, as part of their unit-based support, have given much of the end user training to date. The CruzTime project was created to develop a consensus on a personal calendar system at UCSC. Representatives from the academic and administrative divisions worked over the last two years to assess and recommend a standard software package for the campus. CorporateTime was selected by a campus task force and approved by the campus Information Technology Committee as the product best suited to supporting University-wide meeting scheduling. It offers a robust server architecture and client software for Macintosh, Windows and Unix desktops, as well as access via the web. The Phase II push will target several units within the Chancellorís Office; Executive Vice Chancellor/Campus Provost Office; academic committees; University Extension; the Monterey Bay Education, Science and Technology Center; and the Silicon Valley Center. Software updates, CruzTime news and other information are available on-line at the CruzTime web site. Ongoing training classes for users are planned for Winter Quarter 2001.