Community Center IT Workflow

Software
1

Hey Everyone,

I am volunteering my time at a small community center. They know I have an involvement in technology, so I have been tasked to do a re-haul and have a proper calendar/email system. Previously, they just functioned on a single g-mail address with 1 point of contact and lots of paper.

Here are my thoughts.

Administrator

  • Public Calendar of all events
  • Private Staffing Calendar

Departments

Sharing
What’s the best method option for sharing?

  1. Does each department share their calendar with the administrator?
  2. How does the admin add their events over (automatically)?
  3. Does the admin share their master public calendar with the departments and give them permission to add events?
  4. What’s the best option for automatic flow and avoiding deleting/creating chaos?
1 Like
2

I think i would start with a list of the pain points of the current system, second would be hopes and dreams of the new system. Finally, the skill levels of the users, as well as the time they can invest in learning the system (and you in teaching it), and its day to day use would all be a crucial parameters for implementing the new system. I certainly wouldn’t rule out a giant whiteboard. People could snap a pic of it if they need to view it away from the center. Again, knowing the users and their skills.

For our lab, we have a shared Google calendar, and individual calendars within for things that are meaningful to us. A general lab calendar where we post meetings with our PI, group lunches, lab meetings, etc. Then we have other calendars to reserve our experiment room, another for computer reservations, and another for our undergrads’ schedules. In Fantastical (and others too), I can turn off the ones I don’t care about.
Control granularity is good, the PI and grad students are all admins, undergrads are mostly view only. People address added and removed as they join the lab, then move on.

3

I would go with Google G-Suite and dive into all the available options to collaborate and share.
It also has a great tool to import existing email accounts. When there are changes in the organization you can rename or migrate the content of that account to an other or new user.

Tip once you have created the account go back into the Admin panel and change to a basic subscription for $8 per user per month :wink:

You can create up to 30 email aliases per email account so you can use one account for things like: info, customer service, etc. This will save you a lot of money and makes sorting and managing email easier.