Calendaring Software at the UW

University Requirements

Calendaring software has emerged as a possible core computing need for the University, and a number of departments have already acquired calendaring systems for their own use. However, in order to fit with the electronic environment developing on campus, a campus wide solution must be scalable, secure, accessible, and inter-operable with other campus computing services that now exist or are planned for the future. It is in the interest of all that we adopt a standards based system that reliably communicates with other systems.

Prior Investigations

Since 2001 UW Technology, along with representatives from several campus departments, have studied a number of different calendaring systems for possible campus wide deployment. Unfortunately, we have not yet found a single system that fully meets all of the various criteria, and so UW Technology has adopted a three-fold approach to the problem:

• A web-based campus wide personal calendaring program named UW Calendar;
• A web-and-desktop-based group calendar from Oracle (Oracle Calendar, formerly known as Corporate Time) that is available to all Nebula users.
• A UW Technology service available to all departments that uses the same Oracle Calendar software as is available to Nebula users.

UW Calendar

UW Calendar is a web-based personal calendar that is accessed through MyUW. While it does not let you schedule other people or resources, such as rooms or facilities, since it is not a group calendar, it lets you schedule your own activities, as well as view and incorporate activities from a wide variety of official University calendars, such as concerts, sports, radio/TV, campus alerts, etc. In particular, the UW Events Calendar is available for you to view, select, and populate your own calendar with official events that are created and entered online by authorized administrators around campus. UW staff can be authorized to enter events into the official UW Public Events Calendar by contacting Bob Roseth, Director of UW News and Information, roseth@u.washington.edu.

Students and faculty can also incorporate their entire (or partial) class schedules in UW Calendar with a single mouse click. UW Calendar is under active development and is responsive to user requests for new features. It is an open source development project and welcomes contributions from interested parties.

You can access UW Calendar through the "Calendar" tab on MyUW, which in turn can be accessed through "Purple and Gold" MyUW icons on various "www.washington.edu" pages or from the:
"Students, Faculty, Staff" >> MyUW
link on the main University of Washington home page.

Oracle Calendaring Service

UW Technology is now offering Oracle Calendar as a stand-alone, fee-based service to all University schools and departments. Oracle Calendar provides group calendaring, including the ability to schedule meetings with over 2,000 other campus users. Oracle is available on your desktop, via the web, and communicates with many hand-held devices.

A number of UW departments are currently participating in this program. A current list can be found at Offices and Departments Using Oracle Calendar.

Departmental Support for current Oracle Calendar users can be found here.

Costs of the Calendaring Service

The costs per user for this service are:

• $45 one-time license fee
• $3 per month maintenance fee

Current Oracle Calendar Account holders can download desktop and sync clients.

To find out more about participating in the Oracle Calendar Service, contact oraclecal@u.washington.edu, or call (206) 221-5000.