Date: November 14, 2011
To: UCOP Community
From: Karla Campbell, Director, Building and Administrative Services Center,
Shirley Bittlingmeier, Director, IT Infrastructure Services
The Building and Administrative Services Center (BASC - formerly Building Services) and Information Technology Services (ITS) are pleased to announce the integration of conference room scheduling with the Outlook calendar. The period for transitioning from iSchedule to Outlook will run December 1 – 21. iSchedule will be available afterwards in read-only mode for about a month.
Reasons for the Change
Employees have repeatedly requested a better way to schedule conference rooms. We believe the integration of room and meeting scheduling offers real convenience:
Training
We are hosting brown bag training sessions to demonstrate how to schedule conference rooms in Outlook. All sessions will be held noon to 1:00 p.m.
We also have posted instructions on the Web:
You Will Need to Transfer Reservations
We consulted with Microsoft and the iSchedule vendor to determine if they could transfer existing reservations from iSchedule to Outlook. Unfortunately, the systems are incompatible and a data transfer is not possible. Thus, you will need to update in Outlook your existing room reservations for meetings scheduled December 22 and after. This means methodically going through your Outlook calendar, opening up each meeting one by one, seeing which room is reserved, and then “inviting” that room, via the new Outlook functionality. See the instructions listed above for reserving rooms in Outlook, and for getting a complete list of existing iSchedule reservations.
Note that room reservations already made in iSchedule will have priority. If a conflict should occur, BASC will check iSchedule, determine who originally reserved the room, and mediate the situation. Guidelines for handling room disputes also have been developed. We greatly apologize for the inconvenience of having to re-reserve rooms but believe the benefits of integration will far outweigh this one-time effort.
When to Begin Reserving Rooms
There will be a three-week transition period between December 1 and 21. This time period was selected to balance the need to provide staff sufficient time to “re-reserve” their rooms by updating the Outlook calendar, with the need to minimize the time and confusion when two scheduling systems are in use. By January, when scheduling for the new year really ramps up, we will be fully transitioned to Outlook.
Between December 1 and 21, you will need to use iSchedule or Outlook to reserve rooms, depending on when your meetings are to occur. For
The transition to Outlook will be complete beginning December 22. Starting then,
Let us know if you have any ideas for how to make the transition easier for you, or if you would like us to do a special training for your group. Please direct questions to the Work Management Center in BASC at workmanagemententer@ucop.edu or 987-0600. You can also find information about the project on the BASC website. We hope you like Outlook room scheduling and look forward to your feedback.
