Join us January 15th for an AMA with Champion Achaia Walton, who will be talking about her article on Event-Based Reporting and Measuring Content Groups!
Calendar events should be associated with the report suite and not the user. Alternatively you could give the admin the ability to push calendar events to other SiteCatalyst users.
We have over 1,200 line items in Calendar Events and growing fast. This volume creates som issues. Here is my list of things that would help help us in that regard. Some ot them a reflective of the suggestions above, with some differences.
1.
SUMMARY: Provide the ability to auto-include shared Calendar Events.
CURRENT FUNCTIONALITY: At our company data entry is generally added by a small group of people but consumption is widely distributed. End users must remember to go into settings and manually select the shared events to be included in their view.
REQUESTED CHANGE: It would be useful to provide an end-user based setting to automatically include or exclude shared events. It would be useful to have an admin setting to default to include or exclude (which would be overwritten by the local user's settngs).
BUSINESS IMPACT OF MISSING FUNCTIONALITY: As we have multiple entries every day, selecting shared events becomes a daily task. End users mostly forget or are too busy to manually select shared events. This limits the practical utility of the tool.
2.
SUMMARY: Provide the ability to filter shared Calendar Events by icon and color.
CURRENT FUNCTIONALITY: We have developed a schema based on the icons and colors to identify the events by type. For example, dots are events in our Consumer platform while diamonds are events in our Professional platform. Green is a new product launch, brown is an infrastructure update. End users for the Consumer division do not necessarily need to see information relating to the Professional group. An end user, depending on responsibility, may be only looking for one type of event, such as a product launch. End users may be looking for different things at different times. This can be managed currently only by manually selecting the shared events of interest. The user must exit the report, go to the Event Calendar Admin, find all the event of a given type (for WebMD this is a very long list) and select them, the return and re-run the report.
REQUESTED CHANGE: 1) It would be useful to be able to filter the display by color and icon from the report. 2) It would be useful, in addition, for the user to be able to save a given filer choice as a default in the user's setting.
BUSINESS IMPACT OF MISSING FUNCTIONALITY: As we have hundreds of line items, doing this manually is impractical. Having to see all or none of the items rather than based on the user's roll reduces the utility of the tool. Having to share all or none of the items in the graph and report pretty well muddies the point one might make in presenting it to others.
3.
SUMMARY: Provide the ability to display the list of events with the most recent on top in the admin tool.
CURRENT FUNCTIONALITY: We have hundereds of events logged in the Calendar Events manager (and the list just keeps getting longer). Currently these are listed with the oldest event at the top and the "new" button at the bottom. When we add an event and click to share, we need to keep scrolling to the bottom of the list. When we are looking in the list for recent events in the manager, we are always scrolling to the bottom. When we are adding a new event, we always need to scroll to the bottom.
REQUESTED CHANGE: It will be more useful to have the newest events and the "Add New" button at the top of the list.
BUSINESS IMPACT OF MISSING FUNCTIONALITY: While doable, it is inconvenient to have to keep scrolling to the bottom of the list when adding and sharing multiple new events.
4.
SUMMARY: Create an on-report toggle to turn the event display in the graph on and off.
CURRENT FUNCTIONALITY: We enter from 0 to 10 events per day. These events show in the graph all the time. This is good when investigating but not useful in all situations. For presentations from Site Catalyst the display can clutter the graphing at times making it all but useless.
I have to leave the report I'm in at the moment to uncheck, then return and rerun the report to get at uncluttered graph for sharing or whatever. In an investigative mode, I want to see the items.If I want to hide all, which would usually be the case, I have to unclick all one at a time, do my task, then go back and recheck them all. Doable, but not all that convenient given the line count. Alternatively, I can use a second user account but this still means flipping back and forth. This is quite process intensive.
BUSSINESS IMPACT: It makes it hard for any user to set or accept shared events. The threshold is high enough so that most of our users will not. They ask the administrator.
Note that some events that need to be tracked are cross-report suite (eg. server update, TV coverage, etc.). Something to keep in mind from a data-input perspective.
Different companies use the calendar events function differently, so there likely won't be a best solution, but I agree it needs something so that companies or agencies with multiple suites can utilize the functionality. Calendar events were mentioned in the closing session at Summit, but I believe the functionality can be significantly improved so more companies can use the function.
In my mind, I would like to have the ability to create an event and then select which report suites it is applied to. That way, internal things such as server updates/outages can be applied to all suites since it affects all. If there was a media mention, or specific site update, that event could be isolated to the suite that it impacts.
Recently, I tried to mark a calendar event in SiteCatalyst to note a promotion we did for one of our sites. I quickly realized that marking a calendar event marked that date on every report for every site we track.
This is not useful. The fact that I ran a promotion on Site A is of no relevance whatsoever to Site B and actively makes all reports except one harder to understand.
I would suggest the ability to mark the calendar on a per-report suite basis.
I really can't understand why events are user-based instead of report suite based. Like many others here, we have so many report suites with different URLs, that events are completely useless.
Way at the beginning someone mentioned giving the admin the ability to push shared calendar events. I think everyone should be able to push shared calendar events...just like they have set up the push to share dashboards. With the dashboards you are able to select who gets the dashboard. Hopefully they can set up the calendar events so that everyone can push to share to selected users.
2. That there be a way to automatically push calendar events to users who have chosen to enable alerts - without those users having to manually enable specific events one by one.
