For "resource calendars", such as conference rooms and projects, access is controlled by the departmental administrator in charge of the resource. You'll need to ask them to let you access it. The OIT help desk can help you locate the appropriate administrator if you don't know who they are, but OIT won't change permissions -- that's up to the department in charge of the resource.

Once they've given you access, you go into the "calendars" tab and "subscribe" to their calendar. Subscribing to a calendar adds it to your list of known calendars. This list appears in the pulldown menu on the main calendar page, and in the list on the "manage calendars" function.

People sometimes wonder why we make you subscribe to a calendar before you can see it. Many calendar systems have a simple menu that lists all the calendars. The simple menu approach works fine for a small system. But with a University system, there's just too many calendars. Do you really want a menu with 50,000 entries? By subscribing, you choose the people you want to appear on your menu.

How do I give someone access to my calendar?

Here are instructions to give someone access to your calendar:

Choose the Calendar tab

In the "Current Calendar" box in the upper right, choose "Manage Calendars".

You'll now see a list of your calendars. Click "Edit" next to your primary calendar.

Right under the primary information you'll find a list of checkboxes that control how much information others can see from your calendar.

Somewhat lower down the screen, you'll see a section that lets you give specific users the ability to do things that others can't do. Here are changes you should consider:

If you don't want everybody to be able to see when you are busy, remove the check from "Anyone can view my availability."
If you don't want everybody to be able to invite you to events, remove the check from "Anyone can invite me to an event." If you do this, any attempt to invite you to an event will generate email to you, but will not put a tentative event on your calendar.
If you want everybody to be able to see your actual events, and not just when you are busy, check "Anyone can read my calendar". If you do this, it is still possible to make specific events private, using the "Privacy" pulldown in the box where you create and edit events.
If you want someone else to be able to make changes to your calendar, one approach is to type their NetID in the blank next to "Name:" in the "Permissions List" section and then hit "Add". That will add an entry for them to the permissions table. At that point you can give them whatever permissions you want. For assistants, you would typically give them all permissions. Another way to do this would be to go down to the "Owners" section, and add them as a secondary owner of your calendar. If you do that, you do not need to list them in the Permissions List.

Once you have made the changes you want, click "Save" in the lower right of the dialog box.

Here's what the permissions mean:

"Availability" means that person can see whether you are free or busy. They can see when you have events, but they can't see what the events are.
"Invite" means that person can invite you to events. Actually, anyone can invite you to an event, whether this box is checked or not. When they do, you will get email. If you check this box, in addition to sending you email, a tentative appointment will be put on your calendar. You can confirm or reject it.
"Read" means that person can see the descriptions and other information about events on your calendar. If you do this, it is still possible to make specific events private, using the "Privacy" pulldown in the box where you create and edit events.
"Delete" means that person can delete events from your calendar.
"Modify" means that person can change the details about events on your calendar.

An owner can see everything on your calendar, and also change everything. Note that owners can see all events, even if they are marked private. People listed in the permissions list as being able to read your calendar are still limited when you declare an event "private" or "date and time only".

(Private means that others can't tell that the event is there at all. Date and time only means they can see that the time is busy, but they can't see any information about the event.)

I can't login to the calendar

Please check the username and password you are using. The username should be your "NetID". This is the name you use for the OIT campus systems (rci, andromeda, crab, eden, pegasus and clam) or RIAS. It should just be the username without any @ after it.

The password should be the same as your password on the OIT campus systems or RIAS. If you have accounts on both faculty/staff and student systems, it's the password on the faculty/staff systems.

We suggest trying to login to rci, andromeda, etc, to verify that your password is OK.

If you are using Netscape or Mozilla on a Macintosh, there's something odd that can happen: You may type your username and password, and when you hit the "login" button, nothing happens. If this happens to you, look for the "alternate login" button in small print at the upper left of the screen. This gives a different login screen that should work on all systems.

If you are logged into the calendar and try to do something, it will sometimes bring up the login screen. For security reasons, there's a limit to how long you can use the system without logging in again.

If you are using the old calendar interface, sometimes it will point you to the wrong login screen. The correct login screen is https://rulink.rutgers.edu:1025 The wrong one is http://rulink.rutgers.edu:81.

If this information doesn't solve your problem, we suggest contacting your campus help desk.

How do email notifications work?

There are potentially 4 different kinds of notification by email:

When you invite a person or resource to an event
When you cancel an event to which other people were invited
When you put an event on some else's calendar (because you are a second owner or have write permission to their calendar).
When someone accepts or rejects an invitation

1) When someone invites you to an event, you or someone representing you gets email. The email goes to the person who is registered as receiving notifications for you. You set this up from the web interface by picking "options" and then "settings". Near the bottom of the screen see "event notifications". There you say whether you want this notification, and supply an email address. The reason you give an email address is that some people have a secretary or other agent handle their calendar. You want the invitations to go to that person, not the actual owner of the calendar.

NOTE: for resource calendars (e.g. rooms), invitations go to the person representing the owner of the calendar. Unless you have done something unusual, this is calmaster@DOMAIN. Just like any normal person, invitations will go to the email address set up to receive notifications for calmaster. To set that email address, you must login as calmaster. Any calendar administrator can do that by doing "open iplanet on this domain" from "manage calendars" in the administrative interface, http://rulink.rutgers.edu/admin.

2) When you cancel an event to which other people were invited, they get a notice that it was cancelled. This notice goes to the same person who gets the invitations (i.e. whoever is registered in "event notifications").

[The following are features added by Rutgers.]

3) If someone else puts an event on your calendar directly (i.e. not using an invitation, but choosing your calendar in the add event dialog), you will receive a notification. In order to do this, the person must be an additional owner, or they must have permissions to change your calendar. Most commonly people give secretaries or other agents this permission, but some people allow their colleagues to put things on their calendar. In any case, if anyone other than the owner of the calendar puts an event on it, the owner will get email. The email goes to the actual calendar owner, not the person who gets notifications. Let me explain why: If you have a different person get notifications, it is normally someone like a secretary. The whole point of this type of notification is to let you know when your secretary puts an event on your calendar, so the notification has to go to you.

4) If you invite people to an event, you will get email when they accept or reject. The email goes to the person who scheduled the event, whether they are the owner of the calendar or not. Presumably whoever issues the invitation is the right person to get the answers.

Can I bring in calendar data from another system?

In many cases you can. This system stores calendar and TO-DO data in a format called "ical". This is a standard format defined by the Internet Engineering Taskforce. Many calendar programs can read and write files in ical format. As long as the other program can write an ical file, you can write your calendar from the other program and read it in this one.

In the Calendar tab of the Unified Web Client, there is an icon labelled "Import/Export". Use the "Import" section to read files in ical format and "Export" to write out your current calendar to a file in ical format.

How do I make the calendar system work with a Palm handheld, Pocket PC device, or Microsoft Outlook?

You can set up "synchronization" software. This will compare your calendar on this system with the calendar on your Palm handheld, Pocket PC, or Outlook. As you make changes on one, the synchronization software will make the corresponding change on the other.

See Calendar Synchronization for details on setting this up. You might want to look at the next few questions before doing this.

If you use Microsoft Outlook, you will probably want to use the Outlook Connector. This causes Outlook to treat Rulink much like an Exchange server. However if you are using an Exchange server in your department, but still want to see your rulink calendars, you may prefer to use Synchronization with Outlook, because Outlook can only treat one server as an Exchange server.

I set up synchronization with my Palm handheld. Now other synchronization with the Palm doesn't work.

The synchronization software has two different ways to work with the Palm: synchronization with the Palm desktop or directly to the Palm handheld. We recommend synchronizing with the Palm desktop. If you synchronize directly with the Palm, the normal synchronization between the Palm desktop and the Palm handheld may become confused. If this occurs, the only way we know to recover is to reinstall the Palm desktop software.

There is one disadvantage of synchronizing to the desktop: If you make changes through the web and also directly on your handheld, you will need to hit the synchronize button on your handheld twice. The full procedure is:

Put your handheld in the cradle
Hit the synchronize button on the cradle. This will cause any new events you added on your handheld to be moved to the desktop.
Run the synchronize program on your PC. This will talk to the calendar server, moving new events from your handheld to the server, and from the server to the desktop.
Hit the synchronize button on the cradle again. This will cause any new events you added through the web to be moved to your handheld.

You need to hit the button the second time because events you added using the web won't have gotten to the desktop until step 3.

If you always add events using the web, you can skip step 2. If you always add events using your handheld, you can skip step 4.

When I synchronize, I get a message asking whether it's OK to delete a large number of messages

When you are using the synchronization software, now and then you may see scary-looking messages asking permission to delete 1000 entries. In the cases we've examined, it has been OK to say "yes". In fact you pretty much have to say yes, or the synchronization process will break down. If you're concerned, you might consider going into the "Options" window, choosing "export", and saving the contents of your calendar to an ical file. If something goes wrong, you'll be able to restore your calendar from that file.

After synchronizing, I have lots of duplicate events

Synchronization is a difficult business, because there's no completely safe way to tell whether an entry on the server is the same event as an entry on your Palm or other system. The software tries to tell this by comparing the titles of the events. But in some cases this doesn't work. To be safe, when it can't be sure that two events are the same, it treats them as different. This can lead to two events that look the same.

This normally happens when you synchronize two calendars the first time. When you first start, it's best to get one of your calendars the way you want it, and tell the synchronize program to move data from that calendar to the other one. If you let it copy data in both directions, duplicates are likely.

Some people synchronize several different calendars. The more different data sources you synchronize, the more likely you are to get duplicate events. In general it's best to add events in only one or two places. You can set the synchronization program to synchronize in only one direction, except when you really need to check for new events.

I get error messages when I try to synchronize?

NOTE: This answer will not help in cases where you get an error message saying that you can't login to the server. It is intended primarily for situations where you get a box saying "unknown error."

Resynchronization

It is possible for the synchronization process to become confused. This doesn't happen often. However here is an example of such a situation:

The user sees a question: "Deleting 2 records from Sun One. 2 calendar records. Proceed?" He says yes. He gets the error message "Sun ONE Synchronization: unknown error." This happens multiple times, even after a reboot.

We have seen a similar situation occur after a user fixed a time zone problem. The synchronization tool keeps internal records about your appointments. If you change time zones, the times in those records will now disagree with the times in the actual calendars. The tools appears to become confused. Again, the result is "unknown error".

In both of these examples, the problem was fixed by forcing the sync tool to do a "full synchronization." Rather than trying to find just things that have changed, a full resynchronization takes all the data from the server and your local calendar, and tries to reconcile it.

Before doing this, decide which calendar you trust most. A full sync will clear one calendar and copy all the data from the other one to it. That is, either it will

Clear the data on the Sun server, and copy everything from Outlook or the Palm to the Sun server; or
Clear all the data in Outlook or the Palm, and copy everything from the Sun server to Outlook or the Palm

There is actually a third option, which tries to combine the data. However this will probably result in duplicate events.

You might want to save your calendar before doing this, in case a problem occurs. From the web interface, do "options", "export", and export all events to a file in ical format.

To resynchronize: When you start the sync tool, instead of "synchronize" open "settings". Click "force full synchronization." Then synchronize as usual.

Rebuilding your palm desktop calendar

We've seen one other situation where "unknown error" occurred. In this case, synchronization got about halfway through. It had retrieved all the information from the Sun ONE server. The "unknown error" occurred right as it was about to start getting data from the Palm desktop. We tried all the usual things: reinstalling all the software.

To fix this, we rebuilt the Palm desktop data.

Make sure the Palm desktop is not running.
Look in c:\Program Files\Palm. There should be a directory with the same name as the username on your palm. (Sometimes the name is altered somewhere, e.g. Charles Hedrick might become chedrick or Charles.)
Rename this directory to something else, e.g. olddata.
Start the Palm desktop. You should now see a completely blank calendar (and everything else)
Sync with either the Palm or the Sun sync tool, depending upon which data you think is more up to date.

The first sync with the Palm will take a long time, because it will make a new backup of all the software you have installed.

If you need to access any of your old data, in the Palm desktop create a new user called "olddata". You should be able to select that user in the desktop, and see your old data. You can use copy and paste to move some of it to the new user if necessary.

When I try to synchronize, the process hangs in the middle.

We have seen situations, both with Outlook and Palm, where the synchronization process hangs or gets an error in the middle. In this situation, the sync tool says it is synchronizing a certain number of events, and you see it starting from 1, but it stops before reaching the end.

In several cases the problem was an event with sufficiently unusual properties that it confused the sync tool. The simplest approach is often to delete the event. The problem is figuring out which event is causing the problem.

To find the troublesome event, you will need to turn on the debug log. Go into the Start Menu, choose Sun One Synchronization, and then Sun One Synchronization Debug log. Set the verbose level to 4 and click OK. It will produce a file called rssync.log. For some reason it doesn't tell you where the file is, but if you use Windows "Find" command, you can look for rssync.log and find it.

The log file gives lots of details that you won't understand, but the log has enough information about each event that you should be able to determine the last event that it was trying to synchronize before the error occurred.

I can't synchronize with my Palm, using Palm software later than 4.1

Palm made changes to the data format in versions of software later than 4.1.1, e.g. 4.1.2 or 4.1.4. (There's some ambiguity about 4.1.2. I've seen it said that the version number of < 4.1.2, and sometimes <= 4.1.2.)

Older versions of the sync tool may have problems with any 4.1 desktop. If you have an old version of the sync tool,please get the newest version from the Sync tool site But even with that version you probably can't use the newest Palm desktop.

How do I schedule conference rooms?

You can use the calendar system to schedule conference rooms, projectors, and other resources. If you want to do this, we suggest that you contact rulink_support@email.rutgers.edu and ask us to set up a domain for your department. (Actually it doesn't have to be an actual University department. Project groups and other sets of people can request this as well.) This will let staff in your department create special calendars for resources. The calendars will be associated with your department, rather than an individual.

The advantage of using departmental calendars is that if people come and go, the calendars are associated with the department rather than any individual.

Resource calendars act just like personal ones: in order to see a calendar and schedule events on it, the owner must give you permission. For departmental calendars, you'll need to contact the departmental administrator to give you permission.

There is special documentation for departmental administrators, telling them how to create new calendars and control who can use them.

How do I schedule projectors?

See the previous question. You'd schedule one projector the same way you schedule a conference room. However if you have more than one projector, there's a problem. Someone probably doesn't want to look at one specific projector. Rather, they want to find any free one from the group.

For this, we suggest using groups. In particular: You would set up a separate calendar for each projector. Tell your users to subscribe to all of them. Then go into the "groups" tab in the calendar program, and create a group consisting of all of the projectors. Then they can choose the group name, to see all the projectors at once. They may want to choose "comparison", which will display a nice chart, showing when each one is busy.

The calendar web page is slow updating on the screen.

The calendar program uses "Javascript", a feature that lets the server load programs into your browser. By using Javascript, you can get a much nicer user interface than using plain web technology.

Unfortunately, there's a problem: some browsers are faster in executing Javascript than others. We find that certain browsers take a long time opening popups for functions such as creating a new event.

We encourage you to try a few different browsers. We've had good experience with Mozilla and Netscape 7 (as well as Camino and Safari, on Mac OS X).

[There's one other issue. After midnight we start running various administrative jobs to keep the directories up to date, and to back up the system. These jobs can significantly slow performance.]

The calendar popup windows don't fit on the screen.

Some users find that when they try to create a new event, the popup window doesn't fit on the screen. In particular, the "OK" button goes off the bottom, making it nearly impossible to reach.

This normally indicates that your PC isn't set up correctly. The calendar application is designed for a PC that has a screen that is at least 800 by 600 pixels. Any PC that a University department would be likely to have can do this. The recommended screen setups are:

15 in monitor: 800 by 600
17 in monitor: 1024 by 768 or maybe 1280 by 1024
19 in monitor: 1280 by 1024

Many PC's come with screens set to 640 by 480. But that's a real waste of equipment. If your screen is set that way, it's not just the calendar that is a problem: you're not going to be able to do as much with your PC as you should. Thus we strongly advise everyone who is having this problem to set their display to at least 800 by 600. It's not practical to put instructions on this web page, because they're different for different operating systems.

If you move from 640 by 480 to a higher setting, your fonts will look smaller. If this is a problem, you can set the system for larger fonts at the same time.

While we're at it, there's one other caution: The same PC's that are set to 640 by 480 are normally set to have a slow "refresh rate". The refresh rate controls how often the picture on your monitor is updated. The traditional default was 60 Hz, i.e. 60 times a second. Unfortunately, this is a terrible setting. A 60 Hz refresh rate will conflict with florescent lighting, causing flickering. Depending upon your eyes, you may or may not see this flickering. But even if you don't see it, it can give you eyestrain or a headache after extended use. When I walk down the halls, I see this flickering in at least a quarter of the monitors I walk by. It's just a couple of mouse clicks to fix it.

In experimenting with the calendar system, I created lots of test calendars. How do I get rid of them?

The calendar program gives you a way to create new calendars. For example, you could create separate calendars for your work schedule and your home schedule.

For some reason, the web interface doesn't give you any way to delete calendars. After people have played with creating new calendars for a while, they suddenly realize they have a bunch of calendars that they don't really want, and have no way to get rid of them.

If you go to the main web page for rulink.rutgers.edu, http://rulink.rutgers.edu, look for "Mail/Calendar Configuration Tool" in the left margin. When you log into it, it will give you a list of all your calendars, with a "delete" link next to each one.

I think there's a security problem: I can reuse a saved URL

[I've gotten enough people saying this that it's worth an entry.]

Several people have said that if they bookmark a page in the calendar system, it works even after they have closed their browser and restarted it. They're afraid this means anyone who can get to their PC will be able to use their calendar.

This is true, but only for 12 hours.

The URL's have a session ID in them. That session ID is valid until you explicitly do a logout, or 12 hours has passed. We raised the expiration time to 12 hours at the request of many users, who wanted to be able to use the system for a whole day without having to login again. Your saved bookmark won't be valid after 12 hours. If you're concerned about this, you can use the "logout" button, which will immediately invalidate the session.

When my administrator looks at my calendar they can't delete some events

If you give someone read access to your calendar, they can only see events that are "public." If you indicate that an event is private, others won't see anything. If you indicate that it is date-time only, they will see "untitled event", but it won't be a link and if they also have write access it won't have the delete button.

If you want someone to see (and be able to change) even private events, you'll need to make them an owner. Owners can see and do anything you can do -- at least with respect to events; they can't do administrative operations such as adding other owners or changing permissions.

My password works on rci/eden but not on rulink, webct, etc

If you are having password problems, plus note that no password is longer than 8 characters. Some older applications accept longer passwords, but ignore characters beyond 8. That can lead you to think that you have a long password. You don't. No password is longer than 8 characters. Newer applications don't ignore characters, so you if type a password longer than 8 characters, it won't work.

If you have been using a password longer than 8 characters, try typing just the first 8 characters. That's your actual password.

The reason we're changing new applications is that eventually we want to allow long passwords. We can't do that until all applications process long passwords properly. So we need to stop ignoring characters.

The sync tool is messed up: I can't remove it or reinstall it

If things get very confusing with the sync tool, you may need to reinstall. If you have deleted the folders containing the program, but not the registry entry, you'll be in an odd situation where uninstall can't find enough of the program to uninstall it, but install fails saying you have to uninstall first. You may need to remove the registry entries manually. For the newest version, here are the entries.

The older ones call the program something slightly different, so the first of these entries may be called something else. You should still find it under HKLM\Software\Sun...

search for "sun java(tm) system"
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Sun Microsystems, Inc.\Sun Java(TM) System Communications Sync

search for "extended systems"
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Extended Systems
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Extended Systems
   HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-776561741-823518204-839522115-500\Software\Extended Systems

For the last one, the long number will be different for different users.

My Question Isn't on Your List

If you have questions about the calendar program that aren't answered here, we suggest that you contact rulink_support@email.rutgers.edu. We'll be adding more answers as time goes on.