Appointment

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Revision as of 03:55, 30 November 2006 by Npmmusic (Talk | contribs)

Introduction

One of the parts of TUTOS you will probably use the most is the calendar. Here you define appointments, see an overview of the appointments of members of the teams you are yourself a member of or see all the appointments stored in the TUTOS system.

In the next sections you will learn how to make effective use of the calendar system. It does not look like Evolution, Notes or even MS-Outlook but don't be fooled by its look. There is a lot more under the hood than you think.

Multiple views

The first thing we will do is get you familiar with some of the views that you can have of your calendar. The view that you will probably see most is the one when you click on the 'Calendar' link in your mainmenu. It will give you an overview of appointments for the next 4 weeks and it looks like the screen you see in the next picture.

The TUTOS main calendar

The days all have separate boxs and have a certain color. The current day is marked in green and national holidays are shown in dark red. It depends on your personal user settings which nations holidays are shown. The screen shown also has a number of options that we will discuss here to ease your navigation through the system. At the top of the screen it says "For" and next to it is a pulldown list which currently says 'User Super User'. In this case the options are: 'Team The Others', 'Team TUTOS Development', 'User Linus B Torvalds', 'Members of all your teams' and 'All you can see'. With this selection list you can select what you would like to see in your calendar. To the right of this selection are a number of links for easy navigation. The phrases should be self-explanatory but it you don't mind looking like a fool I suggest you ask your nearest colleague about their respective meaning.

In the calendar itself there are other things to take note of. On the left are the "weeknumbers" and they are clickable to give you a week-view of your appointments. Such a week-view looks like the one in the next picture. Please note that at this time you can not select what you do or do not want to see displayed.

The week-view

That comes later. It is also possible to get a day-view of all your appointments by simply clicking on the day itself (here we clicked on 'Monday') and you are there as you can see in the next picture.

The day-view

Returning to the 4-week view we started earlier is very easy, just click on 'Calendar' in the menu to the left. Now it is time to start creating appointments of our own. Read all about it in the next section!

Create

When you see the 4-week calendar, you will note that the individual dates are links. These links are used to make a new appointment for that specific day. Another way to name an appointments is to click the 'New Appointment' link at the top of the screen. Now lets start making an appointment by clicking on the 'New' option in the upper left part of the menu, or click on a random date. A screen like the one you see in the next picture will come up. Other calendar views are available for a single week or even a single day. You can reach those views when you click on the week number in th 4-week calendar or the dayname in the one-week calendar.

Main appointment screen

On this screen are a number of items and links that are worth explaining. So let's do that right here, right now! As you can see, there are a number of pulldown lists to enter a 'Start date' and an 'End date'. Start and end date can be on entirely different dates to indicate for instance a business trip (or a holiday). On the right side of these pulldown lists is the link 'Minical'. When you click on this link a separate window will pop up (as shown in the next picture) in which you can easily select the date you like. To book an appointment for, say, next Thursday is much easier with Minical then calculating the correct date off the top of your head.

Minical pop up window.

The texts "Start time" and "End time" are self-explanatory. Again, when in doubt, consult with your nearest colleague. The checkbox "ignore above times" (i.e. the appointment takes place at no particular time on these day(s) ) means exactly that. The "Location" pulldown list is used to enter where this appointment will take place. Choosing the option "Out" means that you have an appointment at a different location, "Office" means that people will meet you at the office, and the two options "Sick" and "Vacation" can be used to make clear to others that you are unavailable for any business related activity. Obviously the "Description" field is for er... adding a description to the appointment.

The "Visit at/Visit from" field are used to enter the name of the customer you are planning to visit. If the name exactly matches a customer name, TUTOS will fill in the blanks when you submit the entered information, or it will present you with a list of contacts that have the specified text in their name. Easy, isn't it?

The same is true for the "Product" field as it is for the "Visit at/Visit from" field. Just enter all or part of a product name (or project as you might remember) and TUTOS will automagically select the right product/project.

The "Resource" section is used to allocate certain resources that are involved in this appointment like beamers, meeting rooms and the like. It is also possible to select multiple participants to this meeting, for instance other employees of your company or whole teams. You can even 'trace the agree status' to see if all invited participants agree to be at the scheduled appointment. And to do that it would be nice if you could invite them by email, which is coincidentally also an option. Maybe the last thing you would like to do is remind people a little before the meeting so they don't forget to attend and sure enough that option is also available.

Let's just for the sake of argument enter "Invitation to the ball" in the description field, enter "gero" in the "visit to" field and enter "TUTOS" in the product field. We click on the meeting room resource because that is where we shall meet and set the time at 14:00 until 15:00. This is shown in the next picture.

Filled-in appointment screen.

Now when we click on the "Enter" button we see the results in our calendar. As you can see in the next picture we made an appointment on what is a national holiday in Spain (something to do with San Juan). All data is clickable so we can easily jump to the data about contact 'Gero' or product 'TUTOS'. When you think it looks difficult think again! After making 2 or 3 appointments yourself you will find that this TUTOS thing works pretty well.

Main calendar screen with our new appointment

Modification, repeated appointments and other fun stuff

It could even happen to you. You have made an appointment and someone calls to reschedule. What do you do? This is actually very simple. Just click on the start-end time link of the specific appointment. With our previous example this should be the "13:00 - 15:00" text on top of the white block. This will bring you to the 'display appointment' screen. Here you can see the details of the appointment and even click on the same links as you could in the calendar screen. But now you also have some menu options in the upper left part of the menu. The options you see there are very easy. Click on "new" to make a new appointment, "New (repeating) to make a repetitive appointment (we talk about that one in a minute), "Change" to change the current appointment (clicking on that one will bring you to the appointment screen we saw earlier), "Create a note" to make a note (see the chapter about notes on that one) and "Get Ical File" to have TUTOS generate and send your browser an Ical file. Since Ical files are files with appointment information formatted according to the Ical standard you can use that file to, say, email it to someone else who can then import it into his or her calendar system.

The appointment detail screen

Let's go back to the "New (repeating)" option we saw earlier. Clicking on that one will give us the same screen we saw before but with some difference. Well, before saying anything more I want you to look at the next picture (and I'll call my lawyer :-).

The main repetitive appointment screen

As you can see it looks a lot like the appointment screen we saw earlier. But this time we can enter a repetitive appointment. Let's say we would like to schedule a meeting for the next 4 weeks with our team every Monday from 9:00 till 10:00 to talk about this weeks activities. If this appointment should occur every week indefinitely we would check the "no end date' checkbox. When we are done with entering the data it should like something like the next picture.

The filled-in repetitive appointment screen

When done we click on the "Enter" button and see the result in the next picture. As you can see repetitive appointments are marked with a small circled "R" for clarity.

The main calendar screen with the repeated appointment

Delete

Deleting an appointment is very simple. First click on the start time of the appointment so the 'appointment details' screen will be shown. Next click on the 'change' option in the upper left part of the menu. And last but not least click on the 'Delete' option, a confirmation box will pop up, confirm by clicking 'OK' and your done.

The confirmation window