Events calendaring vs. room/space reservation systems...

[Doug Thompson]

Currently, we're using Ad Astra for room/space reservation and UNL Event Publisher for our public events calendar.

While this setup works, there's still quite a bit of manual intervention to get data out of Ad Astra and into a pleasing-to-the-user presentation in UNL Event Publisher.

It has been a couple years since we arrived at this solution, so I was wondering if there have been any recent developments or suggestions of alternative systems that accomplish these types of functionality in a modern, easy-to-use-and-easy-to-understand way, while still providing the power to do extra things with "bells and whistles" if needed.

I realize it's highly unlikely that there's a "kitchen sink" solution that does it all, but I'd be interested to hear what sort of systems are in place at other institutions.

Doug Thompson

Manager of Web and Electronic Communications

Ohio Wesleyan University

[Daniel Bashaw]

A timely topic for us as well! We are running MRBS for resource booking (http://mrbs.sourceforge.net/) and Calcium as an event calendar (http://www.brownbearsw.com/calcium/) and I am looking for modern mobile- and tablet-friendly replacements for both of these legacy systems this year. I'd be very interested in your suggestions – particularly any open source options.

[Rick Gould]

We use Google Calendaring  - we have Google Apps for Education so all of our employees have access to the Calendar.  We have also setup our meeting rooms and other shared resources that can be invited to the meeting.

We also have public events calendar that get embedded.  

Definitely Not the prettiest but very easy to maintain for all of our staff. They did not have to learn a new system.

[Carmen Lowry]

We use Resource 25 for scheduling. The college has recently implemented 25Live which includes a sophisticated calendaring feature. I have only attended the training thus far, but as a Web Developer I have been quite impressed with the flexibility this system offers for organizing event information and embedding events into your web site using javascript code snippets.

Here are some examples shared on the CollegeNET site:
http://corp.collegenet.com/products/25Live_calendars.html