Calendar

The events, tasks, and phone calls we looked at in the last few videos all feed into the Calendar, which can help you centralize your day’s schedule. Some of this may be review from the previous video about dashboards, but there is a lot of new information here too, so I encourage you to keep watching. Let’s look at the calendar in this video. I’m here on the home screen and my calendar is open to the Daily View. In this display my day is laid out from top to bottom. My hours are determined by what I’ve selected in my calendar preferences. I can change these by going to Activities, Setup, then clicking Calendar Preference. In the Preferences subtab, I can change my working hours. Maybe I actually work from 9am to 8pm, so I’ll make this change and click Save. Now I have time blocks for 9am to 8pm. You may have noticed that after saving the changes I was dropped back to the activities dashboard rather than home. We will cover the activities dashboard in the next video, but for now I’ll go back to the home dashboard. The calendar has several different views to pick from, and we can change to any of them by clicking the buttons up here. There is a daily one that we are looking at now. The day view shows us a detailed look at what we have scheduled for today. It’s useful if you have multiple overlapping activities going on during a day. There is a weekly one, which provides a concise list of all the things we need to do this week. The monthly view looks like a traditional calendar with activities we have listed on their appropriate day. We also have an agenda view where we can look at a concise list of our tasks for the current day. Most controls remain the same between the views, so I will generally use the weekly display in this video. I can switch between weeks by using these greater than and less than signs here at the top. This goes between days or months if you are in one of those display modes. I can get back to my current day, or period, by clicking on the Today button. The time period I am currently looking at, shows to the right of the today button. If I click on this link, I get a popup where I can select a day or week I want to jump to. We have a similar set of controls for the popup. This is useful if you need to place an activity a little ways into the future. In month view the popup shows months, January through December. Right now, I am looking at my schedule. If I want to see one for a resource or colleague, this drop down lets me select it from what’s been shared with me. So, if I choose this one for Mark, we see he has several all-day events going on this week. Most of the controls for his, work the same as they do for mine. I’ll go back to mine now and we will keep exploring. If we hover over an event, we have options to accept or decline right from here. To the right, we have some Icons. The bell lets me know that I have a reminder for the event, and the circular arrows tell me that the event is recurring. Tasks and calls show up with a clipboard and phone icon of their own, but hovering over them does not show any options. I can click on any of these, and be taken to the record for what I just clicked. This is unless it’s a recurring activity, in which case I get a choice to open either the specific instance, or the series. I also have the option to right click and select open in new tab. This stuff that popped up behind the right click menu, is just there because I was hovering over the item. I can add activities in all the views except agenda. In daily mode, all I need to do is click on some blank space and I get this popup asking what I want to add. Clicking any of those links would take me directly to that entry form with the time and date already populated. You could also click on the plus sign next to the time to add an activity. This is what you would want to do if you needed to use a time slot that already had something on it. If I want to add an activity in the week or month view, I also need to use the plus sign. It’s to the left of the day, in the weekly display, and toward the upper right of the day, in the monthly display. I can print the calendar, by using the portlet menu, if I want. The way the print looks is determined by whether I have Day, Week, Month or Agenda view selected. I have used this in the past to print a week ahead and week behind, when I am meeting with my manager to provide a weekly status update. If you stay on the home dashboard these portlets do not refresh by themselves. That is, there is no timing mechanism for them to refresh. But whenever you leave and come back to the home dashboard they do refresh. They can also be refreshed with the refresh portlet button up here. Having such a large calendar, like we have here, does not work for a lot of the people I work with. It’s not that they don’t like it, it’s just that once you get good KPI’s and other portlets setup, the value of your home screen real estate goes up quite a bit. What I have seen most folks do is use one of the smaller columns for this type of portlet, and use the agenda view. This provides the most bang for the buck in terms of screen real estate. You can display multiple calendar portlets if you want or need to. If we select Personalize, and make sure that we have our Standard Content selected, we see there are options to add more. If you didn’t have a calendar portlet to begin with, this is also how you would add it. I don’t need a second one so I am not going to add it, but if you do add a second one, you can set it to view something besides your Schedule, and we talk more about that in the next video. For each of these there are also a number of setup options, let’s take a look. Hovering over the portlets menu, and clicking on Set Up we can see the options we have. Show Events, will show or hide events, which are typically meetings. Show Tasks and Calls, does the same thing but for those activity types. This can be useful if you want your calendar shown twice, once with events, and once with tasks and calls, as an example. There are also options to show blocking and non-blocking tasks and calls. Blocking tasks and calls are ones that have a time block assigned to them; they are scheduled. Non-blocking tasks and calls do not have a specific time scheduled, but might still have a due date. Show canceled events will show events that you or someone else scheduled and later canceled. Usually these do not show up, they disappear on their own when they are canceled. Campaign events are those events that are tied to a marketing campaign your company is running within NetSuite. The normal monthly display shows all the days of the month. Since most people don’t work weekends there is the option to not show Saturday and Sunday on the left or right hand side. For agenda view you can select if you want to see only today’s activities or others that are coming up in the next few days or weeks. You can also set how many records to display in agenda view. So, if you have more than 7 tasks in any given day you probably should increase this number. I’ll go ahead and save our changes and we’re left back at the home screen. The last thing we will take a look at is back at our calendar preferences. We can get back there by hovering over Activities, then Setup, and Clicking Preference. The title for your calendar is almost always going to be, My Calendar, and usually there is no need to change this, since it only affects how you see it anyway. You can control the default behavior of how your schedule is shared. Public usually works well, and is the default, since it lets people in your company see what you are doing, but not the details of the activity. You can also set this to private if you don’t want coworkers seeing what you’re doing, or you can define the permissions below. Permissions can be set for specific users, that override whatever is set above. Let’s add Andy Andrews. We can set his access level to either view, edit or full, and in my case I want Andy to be able to Edit what’s on my schedule. You can also select if the user you are setting the permissions for should have access to your private events with this check box. We looked at preferences earlier to change our working hours, but let’s look at the rest of what’s there. We can set our default view for calendar, but this is the same as what we changed in the portlet. You can set your time increments to shorter or longer times depending on how you work. You can also choose the start and end time as we did earlier. One of the cooler features is shown under Sharing, and that is the ability to generate a URL for sharing your schedule publicly. If I click this checkbox, I get this link. After I have saved this page, I can open the link in a new tab and copy it. I can send the link to anyone in the world who has an Internet connection, and a browser, and they will be able to see my calendar. Of course, you should be careful doing this, but if you need someone who does not have NetSuite access to be able to see your schedule this is a very useful feature. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find many internal systems that can match it. So far, we have been looking at the calendar here on our home dashboard, however there is also an activities dashboard as well, and we’ll cover that next.