birthday calendar or schedule

[AlvinaLa1]

Hi! Has anyone used the Workfront calendar to show all birthdays of your team/dept/org?

If yes, how do you set it up?

We are currently using Workfront to show when people are out of office (they input their own time off). And, we are also using schedules to mark company holidays. Both impact hour availability (admin manage this one).

It would be great if we can also see birthdays on there, which does not impact hour availability. Right now, we are toggling between the Workfront calendar and an external one.

Appreciate any thoughts or feedback!

[Madalyn_Destafney]

Just spitballing, but what if you have a project with a task for each person's bday? Everyone could add a task for their own bday with planned start and end date as their bday (with the current year, not birth year) with task name as '[name] Birthday]'. Then could pull those into the calendar. Could set them up to be recurring too so they add each year/future years...

[skyehansen]

I have a team that tracks birthdays in Workfront. They have the field on the user object. I don't think they have gotten as far as putting them on a calendar so I will probably suggest it to them.

The way I would do it is a bit unwieldy but here's how it is going for me.

Before: team had a text field where people put their own birthdays. These ranged from people who put month and day to people who put their entire birth date including year, or people who used numbers vs text.

After:

* create one field for the birth month (mine was a single select dropdown field from 1-12)

* create one field for the birth day (mine was a single line number field with some validation logic so they can't just put any number in it)

With these two steps, they can group by month and order by year to get a birthday list. And it's a lot more secure with people not putting years in there.

Add on: 

if I was going to put this on a calendar, I would probably introduce a calculated expression to build a year into a date. This would mean I have to recalculate expressions say... once a year? but pretty worth it in my mind. So in other words make a calculated "Birthday field" that is Month + Day + YEAR($$TODAY) and format it to be a date. Then re-run the calculation once a year, or a couple of times a year if you prefer.

This is the date that would go on your calendar.

Edited to add: darn it! I forgot you can't put user dates on a calendar... oh well! I'm back to just having a birthday list again.

[KatherineLa]

I haven't had anyone ask about birthdays yet, but we do handle holidays for our teams across the world. What my team requested was a way to pull all company holidays for specific countries into their various planning calendars. Since the PTO functionality of the calendar can only reference user accounts, I was at an impasse for a bit. Eventually, it occurred to me that "user" accounts...don't actually have to be people. If I can have sci-fi characters as test users, why can't I do that for other functionality? 

Out of that idea, the "Holiday" family were born. I have user accounts called "US Holiday", "Ukrainian Holidays", Filipino Holidays" etc. I logged in as each one and input their PTO schedule to match the corporate holiday for those countries. They don't need to be paid accounts for it to work, so there's no cost associated. 

Something similar could probably be done for birthdays, though I can't quickly think of any way you'd know which person it was from the calendar. That sends me back toward tasks in a project for that requirement.