When you first begun to use Tandem, you are likely going to want to transfer old events from your previous system into Tandem. You can easily do this using our import events feature built within Tandem. To begin, you will need to export your events from your previous system into a CSV file. This is a very common file as it is a very simple Excel file. After you have this file, we recommend you download the import template that we provide to you within Tandem.

CONFIG>IMPORT EVENTS>EXAMPLE FILE

The example file that you have now downloaded includes all of the possible fields for an event within Tandem. The ones that are necessary are properly marked and the ones that are optional are also available. At this point, you will want to modify the events you exported from your previous system to have the same headers (titles) as the example file has.

Once this is done, you are able to import your modified events into Tandem. The system will then automatically alert you to any errors.

Contact us at 866-685-3449 or at support@intand.com if you need any help.

The Tandem Facebook Application received an update today that allows it to utilize the Facebook RSVP system. With this update, users are now able to RSVP for events within the Tandem Facebook App. For schools and universities, thsi gives them the ability to create events in Tandem and easily be able to track attendees via the Dashboard in Tandem. Just another great feature we are giving are user to help grow strong communities!

There are many alternatives for integrating your Tandem for School Calendar with your school website. Today, we would like to highlight how you can use the embed feature to place your Tandem calendar within your existing website. This option allows users to stay on your website while viewing the calendar as well maintain the look of your website when viewing your online school calendar. Here is a step-by-step guide:

1. Log into your calendar and select “Configuration” on the top right.

2. On the Configuration page select “Add to a Website”

3. Here you will find many different ways to integrate your online school calendar with your website. Scroll down to Iframe and copy the code that is in the box. This code is specifically for your calendar and is automatically provided by the Tandem calendar.

4. Next, you will need to paste the code you copied in the previous step into your website. How you manage your website will determine how easy this step is for you. In this case, I am using WordPress, so it is fairly easy.

5. You are now finished! If you need help with this process, feel free to contact us. In the meantime, view how these other customers have embed their school calendar into their website:

Kings Local, Kings Mill, OH: http://www.kingslocal.net/sites/kings/calendar/Pages/kec.aspx

Valley Catholic School, Beaverton, OR: http://valleycatholic.org/high-school/athletics/calendar.php

Concordia Lutheran High School, Fort Wayne, IN: http://www.clhscadets.com/index.php?option=com_jevents&view=month&task=month.calendar&Itemid=147

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.

We love to hear from our customers about how we can improve Tandem and have recently spent some time implementing the requested changes. Here are just a few features that we have recently added to your favorite school event calendar:

1. Copied events can now be marked as tentative or cancelled

2. The day of the week can now be added to event details (i.e. Monday, Tuesday, etc…)

3. An “Event Status” column has been added to indicate either “Active”, “Cancelled”, or “Tentative”. This applies to imported events as well

4. Spell check has been added to the description and notes fields

5. Increase the speed of calendars with a lot of event action history

6. The drop down box for selecting an event time now appears above the textbox instead of below for certain fields

Thank you to everyone for submitting requests!

We recently conducted a survey to find out how schools are encouraging parents to use Tandem.  Here are just some of their responses:

• Provide instructions on school/district website

• Conduct training for parents

• Send a mass email to parents

• Include calendar info on all sports schedules

• Give each parent a Tandem info card

• Advertise your calendar in your Newsletter

• Advertise your calendar in your Handbook

• Send out an Announcement

• Tell everyone at Back to School Night

• Display the calendar at your Open House

• Include the Tandem web address on printed

Yearly Calendars

• Tell parents on every inbound call

• Include calendar info on flyers sent home

• Link Tandem sports schedules on website

• Word of mouth—keep talking about it

• Make it THE way you operate—get on board or

be left behind

• Post it on the city website

• Discuss the calendar at parent/teacher mtgs

• Link intro video on school/district website

• Distribute the “Calendar Intro & Instructions”

word doc to students and parents

• Mandate that the calendar is THE place to get

information—not over the phone

• Eliminate printed calendar and direct everyone

to your website instead

• Include the online calendar web address on

your activity hotline

• Mention the online calendar at every event

Leave a comment if you can think of any other ways!

If you have fiddled with exporting data from Tandem for Schools into Outlook 2003 or 2007 you may have run into some difficulties. If you are running Outlook 2003 one immediate drawback, whether you know it or not, is its inability to subscribe to an ical feed. This means that you provide the URL to an ical feed and your Outlook Calendar goes out at certain intervals to look for changes to events, then updates them for you.

This neat feature happens to be in the much improved Outlook 2007, however, if you are fortunate enough to have Outlook 2007 you may be just as unfortunate to have discovered this next issue. You can’t get events from an Outlook 2007 calendar subscription to sync with your phone. We can hope in the future that cellphone software can subscribe to calendar feeds but that just isn’t going to help us today.

Enter Remote Calendars, an open source Outlook add on for both Outlook 2003 and 2007. This clever little plugin will sync events from any ical feed directly into your personal calendar where it can then be synced with your phone. Download the free Remote Calendars plugin will save you time.

To learn more about the technical side of Tandem for Schools, check out our Support Forum.

Tandem for Schools is a powerful way to manage calendar events,
and communicatethem as well.  Tandem provides a variety of ways
to distribute your calendar to your
school community:

1. On your school web site
2. As a PDF file
3. As a Calendar Link for iCal, Google Calendar, and Outlook
4. As an RSS feed

We have provided a new support link to provide more in-depth information on RSS and XML within Tandem for Schools.  This information will help you supercharge your calendar distribution in all the ways Tandem has to offer.

Find our more about RSS and XML in Tandem for Schools…

And click on links to the left if you need more information about our products.

Tandem for Schools is easy to implement and use, but our users still have occasional questions.  That’s where our support forum comes in handy.  It doesn’t stop there.

If you are still in the information gathering stage and figuring out whether to implement Tandem for Schools, this forum is for you too.  All of our FAQ’s and feature videos are located there, as well as interaction from current Tandem users.  Our support area is a great resource, actively monitored by our developers and support staff, which are there to assist anyone with any questions about the product.   Including prospective users.

Check out our support forum and let us know if you have any questions.

In this day and age of environmental awareness, everyone is talking about small carbon footprints, recycling and sustainability.  Well, we’re no ones to leverage the cause du jour into a crass business purpose, but there are very real ways Tandem can impact the environment positively:

– Tandem may help you reduce significant paperwork in your calendar planning and approval process.  It’s all online, and event approvals using our system don’t require paper sign offs.  This may be of minimal impact in just one school.  But think of the implications if an entire district uses Tandem.

– Tandem may help save gas.  If parents are aware of canceled events via email, they can avoid unnecessary trips.

– Tandem may help reduce paper calendar handouts to students and staff.  Say the choir has a practice schedule filtered through Tandem.  Students can view this online and print a calendar out at their discretion.  And that’s just the choir.  Just think about how the athletic department could reduce their paper output by using Tandem.

These are just some basic ideas.  We want to help schools steward their resources more effectively, both financially and environmentally.  Tandem may just be part of the solution.

Do you have other ideas?  Feel free to post them here.