NEW Public Ward Websites!

[joeneuman]

1. Called and enabled a Building Scheduler. Building-only events could then be removed from stake/ward/branch websites including building cleaning and private events that involve only a few.
I don't really see a purpose for the Building Scheduler any more. There is no such a thing as a Building-Only event. Every event must be assigned to a calendar.
2. Customized the locations and rooms feature. If every room in a meetinghouse were able to be scheduled, building scheduling would be simplified and streamlined. The default list only includes the rooms that every meetinghouse shares. This list is horribly inadequate and most stakes/units are still stumbling along with it still.
Any rescore can be added to be reserved, including every room. As and example we added the projector.
3. Get meetings, especially leadership meetings, off of the public calendars and onto the private calendars feature. Ordinary members shouldn't have to read about Ward Council or High Councilman meetings. Only people they affect should have to see them on their calendars.
Very true. I created a custom private calendar for Stake Meetings and I am always moving meetings to this calendar. I also created Private calendars for private activities
4. Use an abbreviation/acronym before each ward event to identify which unit the event belongs to.
EX: 8th
5. Put all the details for events online. Brief descriptions with a handful of words and a bunch of abbreviations and acronyms are a holdover from the paper system when we had limited space.
The video here is a good example of the level of detail that should be put into it. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/ser ... g?lang=eng
I think it makes the most sense to put the ward mission leader in charge of the calendar and the ward website.

Love everything you are saying. Someone in the bishopric will tell me about an event and I will say I don't think that is a real event. Why? Because it's not on the calandar.

[johnshaw]

It's very sad that this group of very willing and intelligent member is so under utilized.

I'm actually grateful that the Church allows for a vigorous, and fairly open, user community Forum for Tech-related issues. We can disagree (or perhaps agree) with how the Church has organized their official Tech Support and Product Development efforts, but we're all completely on the outside of any of their decision-making process. As clerks, org presidencies, or just random members, it's nice to have a place where we can get a more immediate interaction, find workarounds as well as solutions, and also hopefully help others with our own experiences.

No doubt, it doesn't change the fact that it is underutilized.

There is history with this, the real problem is that we want to move faster than the church wants to move (and needs to move with a global presence) - but mostly it was that The Church Departments get some kind of round-robin ability to have a 'new thing' added to tools, library, etc - Members of the church and Departments of the church have vastly different ideas of what they'd like to see in the app. This is why you look at Tools and see things that just don't make sense while we all still do so many things manually that the church could easily automate only there is no church department that advocates for those things. Thus has it been and thus shall it always be. We had, at one time, the greatest programmers in the world volunteering on these projects and the church ran them off.

[kristaanncook]

1. Called and enabled a Building Scheduler. Building-only events could then be removed from stake/ward/branch websites including building cleaning and private events that involve only a few.
I don't really see a purpose for the Building Scheduler any more. There is no such a thing as a Building-Only event. Every event must be assigned to a calendar.
2. Customized the locations and rooms feature. If every room in a meetinghouse were able to be scheduled, building scheduling would be simplified and streamlined. The default list only includes the rooms that every meetinghouse shares. This list is horribly inadequate and most stakes/units are still stumbling along with it still.
Any rescore can be added to be reserved, including every room. As and example we added the projector.
3. Get meetings, especially leadership meetings, off of the public calendars and onto the private calendars feature. Ordinary members shouldn't have to read about Ward Council or High Councilman meetings. Only people they affect should have to see them on their calendars.
Very true. I created a custom private calendar for Stake Meetings and I am always moving meetings to this calendar. I also created Private calendars for private activities
4. Use an abbreviation/acronym before each ward event to identify which unit the event belongs to.
EX: 8th
5. Put all the details for events online. Brief descriptions with a handful of words and a bunch of abbreviations and acronyms are a holdover from the paper system when we had limited space.
The video here is a good example of the level of detail that should be put into it. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/ser ... g?lang=eng
I think it makes the most sense to put the ward mission leader in charge of the calendar and the ward website.

Love everything you are saying. Someone in the bishopric will tell me about an event and I will say I don't think that is a real event. Why? Because it's not on the calandar.

The Building Scheduler is an old title that operated much differently in the past. The new calling and responsibilities are essential and unique to the digital calendaring system working properly. See: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/too ... s?lang=eng

According to the guidelines, building-only events are events, “that are not associated with events on stake or ward calendars, such as family events, facilities work, and so on. The “private calendars for private activities” are not your responsibility. Those are exactly what the Building Scheduler should be in charge of.

However, your building may not even have a Building Scheduler called which can make it impossible to manage these events properly. You can find out by visiting your calendar and looking at the left column with the names of all the locations, stake and ward/branch calendars. Look at the buildings listed under “Locations” and click on the name of your building. A box will appear telling you the address of the building and who the Building Scheduler is if you have one. If you don’t have a Building Scheduler, then the work-around you’ve created is about the best you can do.

The Building Scheduler is the ONLY person that has access and can manage the Location/Building calendar which are all the events not specifically connected to a stake or ward calendar. For example, the yearly building cleaning is not a ward or stake event. It’s a building event entirely. It shouldn’t show up on any stake or ward calendar, just the building calendar.

I’m glad you’ve scheduled equipment. I’ve not been able to get any of my stakes to customize the locations with the room names/numbers so scheduling the equipment was not a battle I’ve even addressed yet.

The abbreviation/acronym for whatever unit should be quite short, just enough to indicate the unit. Your example of “8th” would work well. My stake has three units. For us: FW1, FW2 and SUM works well. A long title results in critical information disappearing and people having to click to find out basic details they could otherwise see with a short title.

I’m delighted to hear that you are moving meetings to private calendars. So few do this and it unclutters the calendar so much.

Actually, who is in charge of managing the calendars is not something you can choose. According to Church guidelines, they want it to remain with “default administrators”. See: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/too ... s?lang=eng

The computer bestows access on the basis of callings. Aside from the stake president/bishop, counselors, clerks and executive secretaries (and assistants) there are only a handful of callings that have access to the necessary tools. They are Building Schedulers, Stake Website Administrators, Email Communication Specialists and manually added Administrators. The Church prefers we stick with default administrators rather than manually add them.

I’d like to see the Building Schedulers, Stake Website Administrators and Email Communication Specialists (formerly called Ward Website Administrator) callings filled. The digital responsibilities are their main responsibilities and they tend to get addressed. When digital responsibilities are simply an appendage to another calling, they tend to get brushed aside or ignored entirely.

[jdlessley]

Actually, who is in charge of managing the calendars is not something you can choose. According to Church guidelines, they want it to remain with “default administrators”. See: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/too ... s?lang=eng

I don't see where you are getting that impression. Even the help article you link to specifically states; "Other ward calendar administrators can be assigned by an existing ward calendar administrator, but this should be performed with care." The capability to add administrators, the ones who manage calendars, is there. The system has been set to adapt to local needs. The limitation to add administrators has been pared down to just standard callings. In the past, before Calendar 4.0, administrators could be added by using either by calling or by name.

[kristaanncook]

Actually, who is in charge of managing the calendars is not something you can choose. According to Church guidelines, they want it to remain with “default administrators”. See: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/too ... s?lang=eng

I don't see where you are getting that impression. Even the help article you link to specifically states; "Other ward calendar administrators can be assigned by an existing ward calendar administrator, but this should be performed with care." The capability to add administrators, the ones who manage calendars, is there. The system has been set to adapt to local needs. The limitation to add administrators has been pared down to just standard callings. In the past, before Calendar 4.0, administrators could be added by using either by calling or by name.

I didn't say it couldn't be done, but that it shouldn't. Also from the link:

Managing Ward Administrators
Warning: Manually adding or removing administrators should be a rare occurrence.

Default administrators are administrators by virtue of their callings and cannot be removed. Normally, retaining the default list of callings is appropriate. There may be an occasion when you want to add an administrator, such as adding a member to oversee the ward calendars. Do not add ward administrators so they can edit all ward calendars; instead, give them editor rights to individual ward calendars.

The issue was designating the "ward mission leader" to be in charge of the calendar which isn't possible unless you make him a unit website administrator manually.

When I was finally able to sit down with a member of the Bishopric and really look into things at our local level, we discovered several Ward Website Administrators had been manually added, but never removed. None of them had been in the ward for years.

Knowing this, the last thing I did when I asked to be released as a Ward Website Administrator that had been manually added was remove myself, my last official act.

[russellhltn]

The Building Scheduler is an old title that operated much differently in the past.

If I had my way, it would have been renamed to "Building Scheduler Supervisor", since they are no longer part of most of the day-to-day stuff.

[sbradshaw]

3. Get meetings, especially leadership meetings, off of the public calendars and onto the private calendars feature. Ordinary members shouldn't have to read about Ward Council or High Councilman meetings. Only people they affect should have to see them on their calendars.

How do you decide where to draw the line when creating calendars separate calendars for leadership meetings? Do you put a stake leadership meeting for all ward council members on the same calendar as a stake meeting for bishops, or a stake meeting for emergency preparedness specialists, or a high council meeting? Similarly, where do you draw the line on ward calendars between different groups – do you have separate calendars for each Sunday school class, or each priesthood quorum, or single adults, or Relief Society sisters?

4. Use an abbreviation/acronym before each ward event to identify which unit the event belongs to.

Wouldn't each ward have their own calendars, in which case using ward prefixes for each event would be redundant?

[Bryce2787]

Useful info which does not seem to be available publicly - not all units will have a website. They are only established on a stake by stake basis. If your stake was not selected, your stake president will need to contact their area seventy to get the ball rolling for your stake.