Downloaded the latest Collaboration Calendar HERE.
Latest features on the Collaboration calendar
One-View
- The one-view is a consolidated one stop shop for all your events and calendars. Create and Manage events from one-view
- Designed to bring all your calendars together for better visual and event management
- Catch conflict resolution, which becomes apparent, with an aerial view of your entire event landscape
- You can filter the calendars out and in just like you would the events
- A drop-down with a list of all the calendars that you own and those shared with you
- All Out of Box features are available on the one-view continuing the experience of a single calendar
Create a calendar from a ServiceNow Table
- Create events from data, on a ServiceNow table
- Just point the calendar to a table and set the default fields
- Select a field as the title, start date and end date from the ServiceNow table
- Automate all events from the data of the chosen ServiceNow table to create a read-only calendar
Share a calendar with the entire company
- Just flip a switch, the public button, and share a calendar with everyone in your company
- Holiday calendar , Company All hands and so many more!
INTRODUCTION
A VISUAL ONLINE COLLABORATION CALENDAR FOR TEAMS TO DRIVE EFFECTIVE COLLABORATION AND PROVIDES A SINGLE VIEW AND CAN BE SHARED WITH EVERYONE.
Calendar App is an enterprise collaboration tool to plan, organize and share events, resources, assets and anything else that has to be organized across a group of people and time. You can share the calendar with your team and group of people so that there is one destination where everyone can come for their collaboration needs.
What is the problem and how does the Calendar app solve these problems?
Most calendars are designed for individual use and there is a need for groups and teams to be able to visualize work at a team level. Moreover, individual calendars are not visible to team members, and it becomes difficult to plan shared resources/content at a team level. Also, sharing information about events and assets with teams does not scale with existing calendars
Solution: Collaboration Calendar App by ServiceNow
Using the collaboration calendar available on ServiceNow platform, teams can now visualize, manage, and share calendars across teams, individuals and groups. The calendar is fully customizable and users can add and configure using custom fields and assign color coded categorize to visuals several different calendars. Easily share a calendar with an individual or a group of users from within the app. Invite them to collaborate on your calendar. There is also an easy link that can be used to share.
What are some popular applications (use cases) for Calendar
Here are some of the scenarios where the Calendar app can help
- Do you have trouble managing teams and resources on a project?
- Holidays are around the corner, and you don’t know who is OOO when?
- You work with Content and need to organize and plan across geos, themes, and leaders?
- You are in workplace services, and need to deploy resources, or need a tool to book assets?
- Best of all, need one source to share and collaborate across all your team members?
- Build a Release plan across multiple projects
- Plan for reserving Assets (projectors, printers)
- Events and Communications planning and organizing content for social media or communication
What value proposition and benefits does it deliver
- Employee Productivity and Collaboration
- Employee experience: Manage admin functionality with ease in a visual tool (coming soon)
- Ease of use and organization: Centralized portal for all collaboration calendars
Key Features
- A Dashboard view to manage and view all calendars
- Create events using front end tool for flawless experience
- Tag events with categories
- Color code calendar events for easy visualization
- Time-zone option
- Share Calendars
- Quick access link to calendars
- Hide/Unhide calendars (coming soon)
- Filter, Search and Sort on topics and calendars
- Front end GUI interface for admin functionality – Coming soon in next release
- Create custom fields to configure calendar
- Tag your events with user defined categories and custom fields (example, geographic, projects, departments, etc.)
- Connect to your ServiceNow eco-system to create customized events using other data residing on the platform.
HOW TO USE THE CALENDAR
Calendar App –building blocks
Common Terminologies
Calendar
Categories
Events
Custom Fields
A calendar will have categories which can be color coded to distinguish between different categories. An event has to be tagged to at least one category. An event will have default out of the box fields and you can add custom fields on the event.
Category: A way of organizing calendar, as well as categorizing and color-coding events
Event Fields: Information you need to create an event
Out of Box- Default fields
Custom: User-defined fields
A calendar must have at least one category
An event has to be assigned to at least one category
You can assign multiple categories to an event
Getting Started on HOW TO USE THE CALENDAR
Step 1: Create Calendar using your ServiceNow platform instance
Login to the Platform and search for “Calendar” in Filter Navigator
Click on “Create New”. New Calendar record form is displayed
Name - Calendar Name that will be displayed on the top left of calendar front-end
Language - Default Language in which the calendar is displayed. Currently, the only supported language is English
Time Zone - This is the time zone for your calendar and all its events
Color - Choose a color for your calendar. This Calendar will be displayed on Dashboard with this color code
Owner - This defaults to the calendar creator. More users can be assigned this role
Set multiple categories per event - If this feature is enabled, the event modal allows the assignment of multiple categories to one event.
Use default table - This enables the users to save all calendar information in the set of default tables.
Step 2: Create Categories
Open your calendar and click on ‘Load Related List’. Now you will see all the other tabs you can use to complete your calendar set-up.
Click on Calendar Categories tab, and then ‘New’ to create a new category
Name – Enter the name of the category, ex- Project-1, EMEA Comms, Sales Team
Color - Choose a color for this category. All events associated with this Category will be displayed in this color on the Calendar
Order- This allows you to control the order in which the categories will be displayed in the left pane of the calendar. Display is in ascending order.
Step 3: Manage Out of the Box Event Fields settings (if needed)
You can rename, disable, mark as mandatory and reorder the Out of Box Event fields
Mandatory - If true, an event cannot be created or edited without this field being populated.
Active -If true, the field shows on the events modal page
Show on Event Title - If true, the contents of the field will be shown in event pop-up
Order- Can be used to determine the display position on Event Modal
Step 4: Create Custom Events (if needed)
You can create your own custom fields for any specific needs by clicking on ‘NEW’
Name – Event field Name
Label- Event field Name that will be displayed on the Event Modal
Internal Name - can be same as ‘Name’ but with no spaces
Type- Event Field type. For this Pilot it can be text, choice (dropdown) or True/False
Order- can be used to determine the display position on Event Modal
Customer Field Choices:
If you have created a choice type custom field, you can define the values (dropdown values) by clicking on ‘New’ Event Field Choices related lists
Enter all the information and click on Submit. Create as many options as needed. Order will determine the order in which these are listed in the dropdown
Step 5: Create/Edit events
Access the Calendar through the URL or Dashboard
Calendar Front-End
Create an Event
You can create an event by clicking on the date or clicking on ‘New Event’ button
Enter all the applicable values in Out of Box fields
If you had created any custom field as active, it will be displayed on this modal
It is mandatory to assign a category to an event.
You can assign multiple categories to an event
You can create an All day, recurring or a single timed event
Click on Save to create your event
Edit an Event
Search for an Event
You can search the calendar with a keyword within a given duration
By default, the start date is six months in the past and the end date is six months in the future
Select/Deselect Categories and Filter Events
You can deselect the categories you don’t want to see on your calendar. Events associated with that category will not be displayed.
You can filter the events. Filtering applies only to the events currently on your screen.
All Out of Box and Custom fields can be filtered on. Only the events that match the keyword(s) entered in the field will be displayed
You can also use a combination of filters (AND condition)
Step 6: Share
To share your calendar, click on “Calendar Available For” tab, then click on “New”
You can assign 3 types of permissions here:
Can read: Provide Read-only access to all events
Can contribute: Allow others to create/edit/delete all events
Can manage: Allow others to manage categories, event fields and all other attributes of the calendar
This can be done by selecting a user criteria or creating a new criteria for specific users or groups
If you don’t create a record here to provide explicit permission, others cannot view your calendar.
Step 7: Access Calendar Dashboard
You can navigate to Dashboard from Platform view to access all Calendars created and shared with you.
What else do I need to know?
You need to have calendar admin role to be able to create a calendar
It is recommended to create a new user criterion to assign viewing or editing permissions
Examples of how to use calendar app for popular use cases
Team Members vacation planner
Add each team member as a category. All events for vacation or out of office will be displayed in a unique color for each team member
Schedule Resources
To schedule resources across projects, add one category for each worker, and share the calendar with the team so that they know their assignments
Book engineering resources across projects and catch any possible overlapping and conflicting priorities (Future Release)
Building a Release plan across multiple projects
To manage multiple projects with the detailed plans of each project while keeping an overview of all projects, create a category for each project. You can also use custom fields to visualize the various attributes within each project.
Availability of Assets – Book projectors, equipment, and any bookable resources
add a category for each resource so to easily identify when it is available, and members can book the available slots
Events planning (similar to employee comp)
If you want to organize events and need to present the program in topics to your audience, add a category for each topic so that people can filter to see only the topics of interest.
@Krishna Nagara1 We upgraded to Washington patch 4 and I am still finding the filters not working.
Also with the calendar being widely used we are now experiencing the issue Jamie mentioned earlier where page hangs or wont load if there is a large amount of events defined for one category.
We had 1 calendar:
1 Category has 1500+ events
2nd Category has 900+ events
When you uncheck the category with 1500 events you get a page unresponsive message 3 to 4 times before the page refreshes. See screen shot below
To balance things we created a 2nd 2 calendar and move the large number of events over :
1. Category has 1500+ events
This time when you uncheck the category with 1500 events you get a page unresponsive message 1 time before the page refreshes.
FYI for everyone -- this business rule was causing havoc with a custom HR integration we built. Check it first if you see weirdness with the end date not setting correctly. I have turned it off as the script doesn't make sense at all. Why would you set the end date to the same as the start date at the end of the day with the only criteria being an All day event?
I love the Collaboration Calendar, but I have an issue I'm hoping you can resolve. I have created within the calendar, additional Event Fields. This will work and will add to the calendar, but it does not create a new column within the sn_collab_calendar_calendar, Event Fields tab column. If I create the Event Field column there first, then it will show on the Calendar UI. Additionally, it doesn't create a column mapping to the sn_collab_calendar_calendar_event for that attribute where the default column attributes exist.
I've added these manually, but the flow within the UI when adding the details doesn't write it to any columns that I can find. I'm trying to find out why.
The reason is because with the default columns existing, I'm using Flow Designer to take a Catalog Tasks and use it to insert a new event into the calendar. For all default attributes, it populates great. For any new event custom fields, it doesn't.
I look forward to a response.
Thanks.
Jason
Hi! I am exploring using this calendar for a team editorial calendar. It is a great tool. I have a couple of questions/troubleshooting.
1. If I have a field to input an event owner, is it possible to limit the options that show up to those who have editing access to the calendar instead of the entire list of company employees?
2. Is there a way to remove the necessity for a time when inputting the event start and end dates? Or generall have more control over the date/time settings?
a. We are mostly trying to mark general days when events and posts are going out, and the necessity of the time entry is unnecessary for us and somewhat redundant
b. We're also facing the issue that when adding a new event and having the "all-day" option selected, we have to uncheck the "all day" button, add an end date that is later than the event date (because it shows an earlier end date, even though its unchecked and hidden), and then re-check "all day"
3. Is there a way to have different calendar categories have different fields? For example, we want to mix in ServiceNow events and holidays into our team calendar. But the fields for the holiday calendar would be different than the fields for our team calendar. For example, the SN events calendar we may want to have fields to show if it is a holiday, cultural moment, or SN event. Our post calendar is more about what channel posts are going out and who the author will be.
4. In the calendar view, even when several fields show up as checked to show up in event title, they don't show up on the calendar view. Is there a way for the checked fields to show up, similar to how they do in the smartsheet view (as seen in below photo)?
Love this tool so far and hope to use it more! Thank you for any help or insight!
Hi,
I am doing a new install of the Collaboration Calendar v1.6.4 on Xanadu Patch 1 and running into some basic issues during the installation and looking for some assistance.
1) After installing the application, there is a skipped item in the sys_upgrade_history related to an sp_row but unsure how to resolve this error (which might be causing some of the other issues i have)
2) The collaboration_calendar portal page is missing widgets on it, there is only a single widget instance named "Collaboration Calendar" on it and this widget points to no widget. What widgets are expected to be on this page?
3) On the 'calendar_dashboard' page, i was able to create a new calendar, but when clicking the share button in the bottom corner it opens up to the backend navigator view of the calendar record, it doesn't pop up the modal window like mentioned in the documentation
4) There is a guided tour that is running on the create new calendar page that fails on the 2nd step.
Any help would be appreciated with these questions/error.
@Kim Sullivan In Mobile
1. Create a new screen
2. Configure the screen parameters and add the URL for your calendar (see screenshot)
3. Go to Launcher Screen and select Homepage
4. Configure a Quick link (see screenshot)
I have added screenshots for SN and Mobile device
We are also experiencing the inability to create new events on iOS devices. Like GChanner, we find that clicking New Event darkens the page and prevents further inputs. Other devices function without issue. We have application version 1.6.2 on glide-washingtondc-12-20-2023__patch7a-09-23-2024. The device I tested with is on iOS 18.1.1. I have attached a screenshot of the issue:
@Krishna Nagara1 I havea query regarding this calendar app, its mentioned that entire team can collaborate, what does that mean?
Also if i have a group and members in it for eg. 10 members in the group then how will i be viewing the data at individual level and also holistically looking at all the requests assigned to the members on a particular day??
Is this possible if yes can you share the approach to achieve it?
Basically looking for something like this-
Thanks ,
Sanjay Kumar
Has anyone run into a viewing issue with Collaboration Calendar One View? I ran into an issue where an entry that spans across Feb. 27th to March 1st will show up on the individual calendar, however it will not show up in the One View. See screen below. I am not sure if it is isolated to just these dates or if it happens across other month end dates.
Good day @Krishna Nagara1 !
This may have already been requested, but I wanted to chime in -- for future development, we would find it very helpful if there were bi-weekly (fortnight) and annual recurrence options. This is particularly because our use case for the calendar involves displaying company holidays and pay dates (among other things).
Perhaps the most extensible and simplest way would be to use ServiceNow's very good core functionality for relative date selection (as seen in this reporting screenshot) in collaboration calendar so that recurrence is very flexible rather than locked to a handful of options? Easier said than done I'm sure, just a suggestion!
