Jan 23, 2018

The structure of the Sobs Calendar application is somewhat different to many calendaring systems.  While Google and Outlook set up different calendars for different people and groups Sobs uses a single calendar and distinguishes events based on the category selected.  Categories are significant and therefore the first areas that we should consider when setting up our Sobs Calendar application.

Identifying the school terms and holidays

If you haven’t already done this click on the ‘Calendar’ link in the Configuration menu to access the setup for the school calendar.  This will allow you to enter term dates and holidays.  This calendar setup is generic to all Sobs applications and therefore is accessible from each application, and changes made in one application will automatically impact the other applications, so care should be taken when making changes.

For additional information on configuring your school terms and holidays please see the related help article.

Categories are Significant

Click on the ‘Category’ link in the Configuration menu to access the Category settings.  You will start by clicking the ‘Add-category’ link in the top right corner of your screen to begin adding your first category.

You will most likely create a number of categories, one for each type of event that will be added to the calendar.  You might like to spend a little time considering the different types of events that will be recorded on the calendar, and therefore impact the naming of each category.  For example, you might think of creating a category for ‘Sports’ however this is very general and may end up including too many events.  By selecting a more specific category will help staff and students better identify the categories they are interested in, therefore creating one category for ‘Sports – Rugby’ and another for ‘Sports – Netball’ will help classify events.  You can still have a category called ‘Sports’ which then might apply to all sporting events, for example a school sports day.

You can also define the background and foreground colours for each category.  Again it is worth spending some time considering a colour scheme to help visually classify events.  You might tend to give darker backgrounds to academic categories and lighter backgrounds to co-curricular categories.  Retain some brighter backgrounds for public categories and events such as Parent/Teacher interviews, Open days, Concerts and Speech nights.

Force Display: With this option selected events in this category will always appear on the users calendar.

Public View: Use this option on a category that should be visible to the parents, students and friends of the school.

Open View: Events in this category will be visible to all staff.  This is a good default option.   If you have this unchecked on a category then the staff member will need to be expressly mentioned in the list of staff who can view events in this category – further details on specific permissions are below.  With the Open View option checked the system will not check for any specific security to view these events.

Open Entry: Allow any staff member to add events in this category.  Without this option checked you will be required to select specific staff who will have the ability to add, update and delete events from the category.

Approval Required: This can be used in conjunction with ‘Open Entry’ to allow staff to enter events in a category, but the events must be approved before they are visible to other staff (or public if that option is enabled for the category).  The pending event is displayed with a red-dash border and is only visible to the person who entered the event and the staff who area authorised to approve.

Setting Permissions

Once you have created a category the ‘Permissions’ button will appear.  Click this button to configure the permissions for this category.  There are up to four permissions you can configure, and the system allows you to set these permissions for each staff member registered in the system.

Check each box as required – the system updates the information immediately so there is no save or cancel buttons required.

Adding Events

To add events click on ‘My calendar’ in the Main menu – this should display a calendar view with the current week and the next 3 weeks.  The date is displayed in a button on each day, click the date to add an event to that day.

When adding an event you will first select a scope – any scope (except Personal) will display a list of categories to select from.  If you can not see a Category listed then it is probably not ‘Open Entry’, or your login does not have the permission to add events to that Category.

If you use the scope “Personal” then the event will only appear on your calendar – it will not appear on any other calendars.