Tips to Consider when Selecting Calendaring and Scheduling Software in Higher Education

EDUCAUSE, the nonprofit organization whose mission it is to advance higher education by promoting the use of Information Technology, recently released the 2007 list of Top Ten Issues in Higher Education.

This year's list, summarized in the May/June 2007 issue of Educause Review, is the result of an online survey of IT leaders who were asked to select up to 5 of 32 issues in each of the following areas:

- Issues critical to strategic success

- Issues expected to increase in significance

- Issues that have great demand on the IT leader's time

- Issues requiring the largest expenditure of human and fiscal resources

Funding IT, the #1 issue identified this year, is the only strategic issue that has consistently ranked in one of the top two positions since the inception of the list eight years ago.

As education administrators face internal and external pressures to improve productivity and outcomes, they in turn pass those pressures on to IT departments via requests for enhanced support systems. Not only are the IT departments responding to administrators' needs, they are also responding to students' needs for access and the entire institution's need for security and capacity. One critical area constantly needing a campus IT Managers' attention is that of campus Calendaring and Scheduling.

Bob Mahoney and Paul Hill, both of MIT and former co-chairs of the Internet Engineering Task Force Calendaring and Scheduling (C&S) Working Group, defined Calendaring and Scheduling for higher education in a 2001 article for Educause. "In broad terms, C&S may include personal calendars, group calendars, event publishing, resource management, facilities management, and reservation systems." They also added that since it was very unlikely that any single tool would meet an institution's needs in all of those areas, it was critical to identify the specific subset of services needed per department.