University Calendar User Documentation

Getting Started

Any Texas A&M student, faculty member, or staff person can submit university-sponsored events to the Texas A&M Event Manager. Simply log into the Event Manager using your NetID and password. But first, please read our basic posting guidelines, tips, and suggestions.

If you do not know your NetID, contact CIS Help Desk Central at (979) 845-8300 or hdc@tamu.edu.

We require all calendar owners to join the Calendar Announcement email list. You can sign up by visiting https://listserv.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=calendar-announce or by sending a message to listserv@listserv.tamu.edu. Leave the subject blank, but in the body put "SUBSCRIBE calendar-announce firstname lastname". This is a low-volume list, used only to send important announcements and helpful corrections.

Departmental Calendars

To have a departmental or organizational calendar created, containing only the events you choose, simply contact the calendar team and we can set one up for you. Then you can link to it or even embed it into your web pages. Calendars are available for any university department, division or institute. Once you log into the calendar using your NetID, you will then be able to grant other users permission to post events to your departmental calendar. See instructions below for adding users to your departmental calendar.

The first time a person signs into the system, it will create an Event Manager space to allow for the creation and administration of events, if necessary. Your user space is titled "User Event Manager" plus your NetID. But if you have a departmental calendar, use that instead.

NOTE: Your user space is not intended to be a personal calendar or reminder system like Outlook or Zimbra. The Event Manager should be used only in support of departmental or university calendars and should contain only university-sanctioned events. It's fine to use your departmental calendar for internal events - you can mark your events Private so they won't appear in searches.

  • If you need a personal calendar, try the one that's built into your Neo/Zimbra email system at https://email.tamu.edu/.
  • We do not allow user calendars to be renamed as organizational or departmental calendars, and we regularly run maintenance to identify them and change them back. So contact us if you need a calendar to be set up.
  • Student organizations can submit events to the Student Activities All-University Calendar, but if your event has general interest, feel free to submit it to our calendar as well.

What Is My Calendar Short Name?

Departmental/college/office calendars can be titled with the name of the department, using their own unique short name, such as http://calendar.tamu.edu/geography/ or http://calendar.tamu.edu/mays. The calendar short name appears at the end of your departmental calendar URL. You can request a short name or change it by contacting the calendar team.

Posting Events

To submit an event, select the correct calendar from the 'Choose your calendar' drop-down box before you begin. Then, choose 'Create Event' from the Event Manager screen and fill in the details. If you would like your event to be submitted for consideration on the main university calendar (as well as the front page of the main Texas A&M website), check the 'Please consider event for the main calendar' box. For more specific tips and suggestions, see our step-by-step instructions or watch our "Creating Events" podcast.

How Do I Add Ongoing, Recurring or Multi-Day Events?

The calendar system knows how to handle these events, so you don't need to create separate event listings for each occurrence. Here are some faster ways to enter these kinds of events:

  • If the event will happen over several days, such as an exhibit, enter the Start Date & Time and the End Date & Time. The event will be displayed on the start date under Today, and then each day under Ongoing until the end date.
  • If the same event will recur several times during the year, such as Silver Taps or a training workshop, enter the information for the first occurrence of the event, and click Submit. Then use your Back button or click Edit to return to the event. Under Event Location, Date and Time, click on "Add additional location, date and time" to add the second occurrences. Continue until done. The event will be displayed on each day it occurs.
  • If the differences between each occurrence are minor, such as for a lecture series, you may choose to write a brief, generic Description, add additional location, date and time information for each occurrence, and include the specifics of each one under Additional Public Info. However, if the differences are more substantial, you may choose to enter each one as a separate event.

Can I Allow Others to Post to My Departmental Calendar?

Yes, the system allows you to add usernames to your calendar which can have any number of privileges – submit event, edit event, publish event, etc. To do this:

  • log into the Event Manager,
  • click the 'Users & Permissions' link on the left,
  • add the NetID of the person you want to add to your calendar.

Note: Before you can add new users, they must have already logged into their personal calendar at least once, so that their NetID will be available to the calendar system. Also, please verify the correct spelling of their NetID.

After submitting the NetID you will be presented with a list of permission settings that are possible. Choose which permissions you want to give to the person you just entered into the system and click the 'Submit' button. That user should now be able to do whatever you gave them permission to do. For example, you might give "Event" privileges to a student worker to add and delete events, while you might reserve "Calendar" privileges for faculty or staff, since they include the ability to delete users or even your departmental calendar itself.

Reporting Problems

If you detect a bug within the system or have a problem using the calendar or submitting an event, please contact the calendar team and let us know. Some common problems result from not being logged into the correct departmental calendar in Event Manager. If you don't see your event when you search the main calendar, you may have forgotten to recommend the event. Each event must be manually approved, so you won't see it immediately on the main calendar.

How Do I Add Events From One Calendar to Another?

If you already added them under your personal calendar or under another calendar that you manage, you can simply recommend them to your departmental calendar, then switch to your departmental calendar to move them to Posted. To save time in the future, you always want to create events directly in your departmental calendar.

You can even add events from a calendar you don't manage. Go to the departmental calendar to which you want to add the event. Next, search for the event you want to add, using the search box on the right. For example, you can search for the name of the event or the date, such as "apr 7". Select the results you want, and click "Add to Posted."

The Location I Need Isn't in the Drop-Down

First, double check to make sure the location really is not there. Buildings are listed by official name, which sometimes does not correspond to typical usage. If the location truly is not in the system, select the last value in the drop-down menu 'New Value' and you will be presented with a form to fill out the location details.

Can I Manage More Than One Calendar?

Yes. Either calendar administrators or the the manager of other calendars can add your name to the list of people allowed to manage their calendar. Whenever you sign into the Event Manager, you will have a drop-down box in the upper left corner which allows you to choose which calendar to manage. To change calendars, simply choose a calendar in the drop-down box and click the 'Go' button.

Can I Recommend my Event(s) to Other Calendars?

Yes. Whenever you create a new event, you can check the box labeled "Please consider event for the main calendar."

However, after the event has been submitted you can also recommend the event to other calendars, if their administrators have given you permission to do so.

From the Event Manager page:

  • select the event you want to recommend by checking the 'select' box,
  • choose 'Recommend' from the drop-down box at the top or bottom of the form,
  • from the calendar list, click the radio button to choose which calendar(s) you want to recommend/post it to. NOTE: The other calendar's manager must have added your NetID to their calendar to allow you to recommend events.
  • click 'Go' to submit the event.

Selected events with general interest to the campus community will appear by default on the calendar home page. But you can click on "Show All Events" or "Today" to view the complete list, including departmental lectures and specialized workshops. Before your event can be featured, it needs to be recommended to the main calendar. From the featured events, the Division of Marketing and Communications chooses several events each day to be highlighted on the university home page, based on their interest and usefulness to website visitors.

Exporting Events

The Event Publisher allows for a very robust method of exporting events. In most cases, events can be exported into either RSS or iCal format by clicking on the RSS and iCal icons located on most calendar page views, including departmental calendars and searches. In addition, you can also create an export URL for a more customized view. Possible values are:

http://calendar.tamu.edu/?format=hcalendar Returns a snippet of hcalendar-formatted XHTML
http://calendar.tamu.edu/?format=rss RSS subscribe-able feed of today's events
http://calendar.tamu.edu/?&search=search&q=Seminar&
format=rss		 RSS feed of upcoming seminars
http://calendar.tamu.edu/?format=ics .ics iCalendar-formatted file of today's events
http://calendar.tamu.edu/opas/?upcoming=upcoming&format=ics .ics iCalendar file of upcoming OPAS events
http://calendar.tamu.edu/?format=xml XML output using UC Berkeley events schema
http://calendar.tamu.edu/?format=html Full HTML webpage (default)

Helpful Tips

We have developed a separate Helpful Tips page for calendar owners and contributors. You can read more suggestions and best practices in the Step-By-Step Instructions document. We have also released three podcasts: Setting Up Your Calendar, Creating Events, and Managing Events.

Where Can I Get More Information?

Information can be found online on the Calendar Help Page, on the Texas A&M Webmaster's Blog, through the Calendar Announcement email list, or by contacting the calendar team. The Texas A&M university calendar is based on the UNL Event Publisher, created by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Full documentation of the project is available on the Google Code open source project repository.


Calendar