Management Brown Bag Lunch
Today I had the pleasure of running the UEN Technical Services Brown Bag Lunch since Jim needed to be out in the hinterlands today. Four of us met for about 45 min. and ate our chow while we discussed various topics from Taxes to working better together.

It was brought up that one of our major issues with working together is that we are not all on and using the same scheduling system/package and metodology. Some of us are on GroupWise while others are using the Exchange server or a local Outlook calendar to keep track of their schedule.

One idea we discussed is to first start getting all of us to schedule appointments propperly I.E. use the request/schedule group appointment option, rather then sending emails or posting appointments on calendars for group appointments.

Those of us that showed up for the brown bag feel that it is very important the we pick a standard package and methodology, enforce/encourage it's use and stick with it. Obviously this will not be an easy task.

One idea explored is the use of a open source internet standard and RRF of iCalendar (supported by most of the major groupware applications). iCalendar is a way to share appointments and calendars by using WebDAV and XML if I remember right. Bryan Peterson offered to look into the options out there that support iCalendar and to see if we can find an open source (or low cost vendor) solution to this need. We also need to explore if that solution will intigrate with other groupware and clients in use at this time.

The testing we have done with GroupWise<-->Exchange/Outlook gateway and interaction has not panned out as well as we thought it would. There is no automatic syncing of information between the two servers so the gateway is not anywhere as close to as functional as we hoped it would be.

I will do some research into iCalendar when I get some time (and ask my staff to also-you can guess who the usual suspects will be ;) ) and post the results to my blog.

On a side note about "We work together by getting things done" I made mention in the meeting that I have been observing encouraging thing going on in the department. People ARE working together--even people that have not worked or worked well together in the past. There seems to be better communication and coordination, and--Is it just me or is there a much better attitude and atomosphere lately?

That is all for now. bb
1:36:18 PM     comment []