Main Campus view of events

Event Detail

University of Chicago // Event Calendar Replacement

How do you create a unified view of a decentralized university?

Skills used: application project management.

A user should have one place to check a university's public events. University of Chicago had an outdated, hand-coded events calendar hosted on an ancient and unreliable web server. Since calendar standards have come along way in recent years, writing a calendar solution from scratch was certainly not necessary.

Technical issues aside, the larger the university, the more difficult it is to have units contribute their events to a single calendar space. We implemented Bedework, an open source calendaring product.

This effort included gathering user requirements, devising a communication and transition plan for current calendar users, launching new technologies, recruiting new calendar users and developing a suite of widgets for individual departments to use.

Users were sold on a suite of calendar widgets that were embedded in the department's website. The individual departments and organizations would enter their own events, and in turn, indirectly populate an all-campus view of events.