Hi Pat,

Some people in our department have been using Netscape Calendar with
considerable success.  It allows everyone in the department (with a free
Netscape Calendar account) to see what everyone else is up to, and you can
allow your assistant access to schedule for you if you want.  It does not
allow unauthorized scheduling.  However, we have found that a significant
hurdle to overcome is a perception of the users that they will have less
privacy if everyone in the department can see what their schedule is.  Of
course, this defeats the whole purpose of communicating availability
because double-checking by phone is necessary.  Eventually folks catch on
that it saves more time and trouble to log in appointments, not-available
time, etc. -- and has the added advantage of everyone getting everything
done in a timely fashion (ideally).

Perhaps, one stumbling block for you is that it will require a training
session, which is very basic, but will ensure that everyone is on the same
page.  It is Web-based, so it's easy to access, and it's easy to use once
you get the hang of it.  I'm not sure you'll find any program where all of
you won't have to get together for an hour or two to make sure everyone
knows how to use it.

I use Now Up-to-Date, it's easy to use, but everyone would have to buy a
copy which can get very expensive.  Netscape Calendar is free.

Perhaps someone else has more experience with Netscape Calendar and can be
more informative?

-Satre

At 11:19 AM -0400 7/13/01, you wrote:


>Hi Everybody:
>
>     We're trying to do a better job at our institution of co-ordinating
>the activities of our various staffs. We're looking for some sort of an
>on-line scheduling system that we can use to integrate all our work
>schedules so that we'll be able to see at a glance what everybody's up to.
>The idea is to make sure that the right hand knows what the left hand is
>doing. Also, we want to be able to use it for the purpose of setting
>timelines and deadlines for getting things done. At the same time, we want
>it to be something that's easy to access and use; something you don't need
>to be a computer expert to understand. Is there any such animal? Is there
>a system that any of you could recommend?

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