TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:Online calendar for scheduling projects From:Deborah Stacy <dstacy -at- CreativeSolutions -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com Date:Fri, 2 Jun 2000 14:46:58 -0400
Hi all -
I've searched the archives and didn't find anything, so I'm coming out of
lurk mode...
My department is about to start scheduling for our fall/winter projects.
There are a lot of projects that will be split up between approximately
eight writers. We're trying to find a way to get all of the significant
dates in a calendar that can be viewed by those of us who will be doing the
scheduling. (Last year we didn't have any type of calendar set up - just the
spreadsheet that we use for scheduling - and one writer wound up having
three deliverables due in two days because there was no way to see the 'big
picture.' We don't want to run into that again.)
In the past, the people doing the scheduling maintained a calendar for each
writer using Calendar Creator. While this was helpful for the writers, it
took way too much time to maintain the calendars. Also, we've tried
Microsoft Project in the past, but found it limiting.
We just upgraded to Office 2000 and I was looking around in Outlook's help
to find information about posting an Outlook Calendar as a web page. (Btw,
we're running Outlook 2000, Windows 98, PC environment.) I found a couple of
help topics that were _sort of_ helpful and I found a white paper on new MS
Office features on the MS web site, but I'm wondering if anyone has actually
used this feature. If you have used it, what kind of commitment was needed
from the IT department? Is the calendar easy to maintain? Did you run into
any major problems? Did you post the calendar on a personal web server,
intranet, or Net Folder? (I think I'll probably have to go with the personal
web server - the powers that be decided not to allow any more department
pages on the intranet.) How did you set up the additional calendar in
Outlook? (The help directed me to tabs and buttons that don't seem to
exist.)