With so many different kinds of “groups”, it may be tough to keep them straight.  Our goal is to give you the most flexibility, multiple levels of privacy, and full customization to make your calendar match your unique circumstances.  Here are the differences between the various groups that you may encounter:

User Viewing Groups: Determines who an event is visible to.  If you want to add an event for only Principals to see, then create a User Viewing Group called “Principals” and place those Principals into that group.  When they sign in, only they will be able to see those events.  Examples:  ‘Everyone’, ‘Private’ users, or a more specific group of people such as ‘Principals’.

Primary Groups:  Determines who can edit events once they are on the calendar.  If an event is added to the calendar by someone in the ‘ABC High School Calendar Management’ group, the event is now owned by that Primary Group.  Only other users in that same primary group with calendar operator permissions are able to edit that event.

Permission Groups:  These are assigned to users that need access to specific areas of the calendar, such as the ability to add events to the calendar or edit the list of facilities in your database.

Groups: These are the people (clubs, organizations, teams, etc.) that will be attending or participating in events.  Remember, users track groups that they are involved in or interested in, in order to receive email/text message notifications and updates for events.

This next installment of the Tandem Smart Brief series compares Microsoft Outlook to Tandem for Schools.  While Microsoft Outlook is intended for office use, some schools try to use it as a online academic calendar and have limited results.  Here are some highlights of the key differences between Tandem for Schools and Microsoft Outlook:

-Both can send email notifications

-Tandem can give directions to events

-Tandem can rent facilities online

View the entire Smart Brief: Outlook Vs. Tandem for Schools

When selecting a online school calendar it is important for a school to pick not just an online calendar but an online school calendar.  That is why we here at Intand have develop a series of Tandem Smart Briefs centered around comparing Tandem for Schools with other common calendaring systems.  The first installment or our series compares Google Calendar to Tandem for Schools.  Here are a few highlights:

-Booth are a hosted solutions

-Tandem has a simple and flexible approval system while Google Calendar does not.

-Tandem allows users to send text message updates

View the entire smart brief: Google Calendar vs. Tandem for Schools

We have added new features to your favorite online school calendar again! This time we made two significant upgrades that allow users to take advantage of more recent technology.

-Twitter: You can now post a tweet about new and changed events to your twitter account straight from your school calendar.  You can also sign in to Twitter with your Twitter login if you are already signed into Twitter.

-QR codes: You can now print a PDF document containing QR codes for specific groups and facilities that will allow smartphone users to automatically sync events with their personal calendar.

-Ability to disable/remove: Schools, Schedules, Photos, News, and Yearly Calendars

-Batch invoicing for Facility Rentals

-Better “Edit Recurrence” wizard for Event and Facility Rentals

Enjoy!

These past two weeks have seen a lot of great articles posted on our Twitter stream.  You can view them all by going to twitter.com/intand.  Below are a few of our more interesting tweets:

Ideas to Increase Parent Communication in Schools – This article focuses on ways schools can increase communication with parents.  It lists many very actionable measures that a school can use to increase parent communication.

Put Your School’s Calendar Online! – Somewhat of an older article but the point remains the same, put you school’s calendar online!  And we couldn’t agree more.  With today’s technology their is no reason not to put your school calendar online.

Target Announces Plans to Reach $1 Billion in Support of Education – It is always great to hear that corporations are willing to put money into education.  Target is donating another $500 million to help education as part of a new reading initiative.