Multiple Calendars
"A man with two watches never knows what time it is." - Chinese Proverb, (and a great reason to get all your events into one calendar).
Can I have multiple calendars in the same solution: for different individuals or different parts of the company?
Yes. This is actually pretty common as the calendar often starts spreading into new areas of a solution once deployed.
The key is that you'll have one instance of the calendar (one calendar layout) that can point to multiple objects in the same solution. Here are some examples:
- You can have one table of appointments and then show each user just *their* appointments (or show managers *their team's* appointments) using pre-filters. Documentation on that is here: Only See My Events
• You may want to point the calendar at entirely separate tables (we call these the calendar's "sources") so you may have an appointments table and a work orders tables, both with dates that need to show up on the calendar. Information on setting that up is here: Multiple Sources
• And you can schedule different kinds of resources in the same calendar. So you may be tracking your pre-sales appointments by salesperson, but scheduling active jobs by truck number. Both salespeople and trucks can be resources. More on managing large numbers of resources here: Resources
• Keep different kinds of events visually distinct by assigning color codes to them. Colors can be used for temporal statuses (like waiting or done) or for stages of your workflow (like sketching, cutting, assembly)-though stages or departments like that may be better represented as "resources" so you can more easily see each departments load over the week. Instructions for setting up color coding are here: Event Colors
• Finally you can use filters to take a very complicated set of events and narrow them down to what a given user needs to see--maybe "open workorders for my department". Power users can manipulate their own filters or you can set filters for them upon start-up or lock them into a filtered state under the hood. Detailed information on working with filters is here: Filters
Hope that helps and gives you an overview of how one calendar can work for multiple constituents at the same company. And the cool part is that when power users want to overlay these different "sources" on top of each other, they can, and can thus see the company's activities in context.
