dPartmental information

Why dCal?

dCal, based on Oracle Calendar, provides the following:

See the Service Statement for more details.

Getting started

Instead of having its members individually sign up to use dCal, a department or group may wish to coordinate its adoption and use of dCal. If your group is not already using a collaborative calendar, or wants to make a fresh start using dCal, you can start your own dCal adoption right away, but you may wish to speak with us about resources and support training. Alternatively, if your group already uses a group calendaring system, you must decide whether your group needs to move existing data from that system to dCal. For more information on migrating data, see the dCal Data Migration Planning Guide. In either case, for departments considering adopting dCal as their calendaring system of choice, OIT provides consultation services.

Support

Your department's local support staff will be expected to provide end-user support for dCal, with OIT providing information and assistance to the support staff when necessary. To familiarize yourself (and your support staff) with dCal usage and other dCal concepts, such as meeting ownership and access rights, you should read through the available support materials, including the Oracle Client help files and our additional dCal Support information. Specific departmental support roles are defined in the dCal Departmental Support Guide.

Resource considerations

In addition to personal calendars, you'll likely bring resources (rooms, equipment, group calendars) into dCal as well. Before you do, you should be familiar with using resources in dCal. To ensure that your resources will meet your needs, plan your resource requests and resource management assignments in advance. To be ready to use your dCal resources, you should read the resource how-to information.

Example policies

The greatest collaborative advantages of using dCal are realized only when a group of people who work together and meet regularly (a department, research team, or working group) all use dCal, keep their dCal agendas accurate and up-to-date, and allow others to view their availability and schedule meetings. As with other collaborative media such as e-mail, an agreed-upon and widely-understood policy and etiquette for using dCal helps ensure smooth and effective working practices and reduces the potential for problems and misunderstandings.

To assist you in planning and communicating how your group will use dCal, we have drafted some sample policy documents: