Tech Forum

Excellent comments all. People have different preferences, and multiple communication methods are necessary. In the "old" days information did not get to many, and the new calendar is a powerful new tool, especially if used to the full potential it was designed.

Got another call today from an RS president who had an event scheduled Thursday night. A young single adult group came in to play basketball before they were done, claiming they had the building, and basically kicked them out. Turns out the scheduler had created overlapping reservations, the YSA group every Thursday and the Relief Society on the 2nd Thursday of each month. Only the RS had scheduled an actual event though, the YSA group just assumed they had it because of the standing reservation.

Two back-to-back posts that are kind of interesting there, craiggsmith...

craiggsmith wrote:Our youth leadership said that one of the reasons they didn't want to put the events on the calendar was because they were afraid youth wouldn't come if they knew what the activity was.

How disappointing that is to hear as a parent of 4 teenagers! Perhaps those leaders are forgetting that sometimes my youth attend because I watch their online calendars and encourage them to go...

TinMan wrote:If I have a single recurring event every Tuesday that says "Mutual, 7:00 PM" then it becomes the responsibility of each leader to see that each youth in his stewardship knows what is going on...

I've thanked each of the YM & YW leaders that have kept me involved by updating calendar events -using the calendar to deliver information to my family -who, what, how, and most importantly why my children should come. Because I see it....

To the original question, "are reservations worth it?" this thread is valuable to debate, and I see some valid points-pro and con. If you really are just debating using a reservation with no event, as opposed to using a "generic" recurring event with no reservation (and no real information,) I see them as virtually the same- an ineffective use of a powerful tool.

I think the expectation behind a recurring event is that exceptions to the date and time would at least be updated even if the description were not. If they weren't updated then the event wouldn't be useful and it could actually do more harm than good.

So the best advice for new Building Schedulers is to use reservations as little as possible:
Funerals, weddings, weekdays, Saturdays.
Is that it?

As a heads up, when calendar 2.5 is released (maybe 2 weeks?), it changes the term "reservations" to "restrictions." I know this is just a language fix to the problem, but hopefully it will alleviate some confusion.

1dave wrote:So the best advice for new Building Schedulers is to use reservations as little as possible:
Funerals, weddings, weekdays, Saturdays.
Is that it?

Funerals and weddings are events and should be scheduled as events. A "reservation" as used on the reservation calendar is a restriction limiting what specific unit can schedule an event during the reservation time period and using the resources identified in the reservation. If you create a reservation on the reservation calendar for a funeral or a wedding thinking you are going to prevent anyone from scheduling an event, you may get surprised when an organization in the unit for which you created the reservation actually schedules another event at the same time as the funeral or the wedding using the same rooms. Double booking? No, because a reservation does not book resources. It only sets those resources aside for a specific unit.

I don't know what is meant by "weekdays, Saturdays" in the above statement.

1dave wrote:So the best advice for new Building Schedulers is to use reservations as little as possible:

Yes

1dave wrote:Funerals, weddings, weekdays, Saturdays. Is that it?

No, I wouldn't use "reservations" for that. In our stake we use reservations ONLY for "ward night". That's it. Everything else is an event. Even then we expect the wards to schedule events on their night if they want to see anything in their calendar.

johnsonth wrote:As a heads up, when calendar 2.5 is released (maybe 2 weeks?), it changes the term "reservations" to "restrictions." I know this is just a language fix to the problem, but hopefully it will alleviate some confusion.

Excellent news! Thanks!