The MyOffice Blog

Using different colours is a useful way to differentiate between types of appointments,  and MyOffice gives you 3 methods of colouring appointments.

First and foremost you can simply edit the appointment colour for each appointment (using the Colours tab) and set whichever colour you like. There are plenty to choose from and if you don’t like the set colours you can create your own custom colours.

Then there are 2 automatic methods.

Which one you use tends to depend upon the way you use diaries. You may, for example, have one diary with lots of users having access and adding / editing appointments. If its important to know which user added / edited an appointment you can configure MyOffice to have a different colour for each user. Suppose you have 3 users (Tom, Dick and Harry) and you want to assign Tom = Red, Dick = Green, Harry = Blue. Each user selects the colour they will use by clicking Tools > Options. The colour is configured in the ‘Appointment Colour’ tab. Then when you see a blue appointment in a diary you’ll know it was entered or amended by Harry. The colour applies to all diaries that Harry has access to … so whenever you see a blue appointment you’ll know that it was made by harry.

This technique is most useful when you have 1 diary and you want to put everyon’e appointments in that diary.

On the other hand, you may want to set up individual diaries for users or for other things like meeting rooms and equipment allocation. With lots of diaries its probably more appropriate to have a different colour for each diary. Then, if you overlay them with the ‘Show multiple diaries’ checkbox you can see which diary is which in the combined view.

You set a colour for a diary by editing the diary in Tools > Diary Admin (Details tab)

There’s another colour variation that is currently being developed and that’s to allow different types of appointments to be classified with specific colours. For example, you might want to classify an appointment as ‘Sales’ or ‘Survey’ or ‘Installation’ and have different colours to denote these 3 types. This change is conditional upon the classification of appointments being developed but hopefully we’ll see this implemented in the not too distant future.

There’s a new breed of laptops on the block … ulta light, ultra portable devices called UMPCs (Ulta-Mobile PCs)

I’ve been trying the new Asus EeePC 900 to see how well MyOffice runs on it … and the answer is ‘very well indeed’. My Eee PC came pre-installed with Windows XP so installing MyOffice was simply a matter of downloading the software from our web site.

The best part about the Asus is its size and weight. It weighs in at only 0.92kg and has an 8.9 inch screen making it really portable. Its definitely a competitor to my Pocket PC. Whereas the Pocket PC makes hard work of sending emails, the EeePC is a true notebook with a screen and keyboard large enough for ‘power’ use. And when it comes to travelling it’s certainly small enough to pop into a flight bag whereas I’ve never been happy about lugging a heavy laptop onto a plane.

It also has a solid-state hard drive which means that bumps and shocks are no longer an issue. Connection to the internet is either by wireless or the RJ-45 port.

I’ve been logging on to MyOffice for several weeks now and using it in place of a powerful desktop and I’m delighted to say that’s it’s really usable. I can’t have as many windows open as I would on the desktop but the 1024 x 600 displays all the MyOffice windows adequately. All the main windows (Diaries, Contacts, Emails, Tasks etc) display fully on the screen, making it a genuine alternative to a larger PC or laptop. By now you’ll probably have guessed that I’m impressed with my new toy … except that its not a toy .. its a real notebook that you can use all day.

 That’s the first of the lightweight UMPCs that I plan to test over the next few months. Next on the list is Acer’s Aspire and Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9.

Sometimes you search for an appointment and you know it was there but you can’t find it.  The usual reason it’s not there is that another user has deleted it.

There’s no ‘rollback’ in MyOffice so once an appointment has been deleted it’s gone … period.

There are however a couple of techniques you can employ to minimise accidental deletions. First, you can tell your colleagues to move appointments that they were going to delete to another diary, called something like ‘Deleted appointments’. So, rather than deleting them, you are moving them. This avoids losing the appointment details.

Secondly, you can configure MyOffice to notify you, by email, every time an appointment is deleted. You configure this for each diary so if you’re having a problem with just one diary you could configure the notification for that diary. The notification emails all the appointment details together with the name of the user who deleted the appointment and the time of the deletion.

Hopefully, these suggestions will at least retain the data from any accidentally deleted appointments, enabling you to re-instate the appointments if necessary.

If you’ve been using MyOffice for several years you’ll probably have lots of very old appointments.  When I say lots, I’m talking in thousands, not hundreds. The suggestions in this blog only apply to users with LOTS of old appointments.

At start-up MyOffice does a refresh from the server to your local PC to create an ‘up to date’ copy of your data in case you need to run MyOffice in ‘Offline’ mode.  Typically you would run MyOffice in ‘Offline’ mode if your internet connection went down and you needed to carry on working. Being able to work in ‘Offline’ mode is one of the key advantages MyOffice has over ordinary web based applications.

If you’d like to speed up your start-up there are a couple of techniques that you can use when it comes to appointments.

Method 1 - Create a new diary and start using that instead of the old diary. Set the diary permissions on the old diary so that no-one has access to the diary. You can always re-instate access if you need to go back and view the old appointments. At start-up the old diary won’t be refreshed because you no longer have access to it … but the new diary will … thus speedng up your start-up time.

Method 2 - Simply delete old appointments. To do this search for all appointments in a date range. e.g. 1 Jan 2006 - 31 Dec 2006. Leave the search criteria box empty. In our example, this will list all appointments in 2006. Then, multi-select all the appointments using the left mouse button and the Shift key and delete them.

Which method you use depends upon whether or not you want to keep the appointments. Method 1 will save them. Method 2 will delete them.

One of the more common questions we find ourselves on the receiving end of here at MyOffice is “I’ve made a new user but I can’t see their diary, help!”. It’s a sensible question because, well, there isn’t a diary there for them to see, because we don’t automatically create a diary for each new user. So why don’t we just create a new diary for each new user? Well…

As you’ve noticed, we charge per user, not per diary. We do this for a very simple reason. Simply put, we don’t want to tell you - the users - how to use the system, and how to organise your diaries, or for that matter, task lists, email folders, file store, or contact groups. Therefore, in MyOffice, users are considered to be separate from diaries, task lists, contact groups, and all of the other things you can use and share within your account. 

Over the years we’ve noticed that businesses like to organise their data in extremely varied ways, with diary data being a prime example of this. Yes, there are those companies who like to have a separate diary for each user. This clearly makes great sense where each employee’s time is allocated separately, and seeing what each individual is up to at a given time is the name of the game. However, there are certainly plenty of companies who adopt precisely the opposite approach, organising their diaries by business function, rather than by who’s actually going to be doing the work.

One absolute classic example of the “Nobody’s Diary” case is the “Staff Holiday” diary. Using a single diary to record all staff leave seems to be very common concept (if our support records are anything to go by), because it’s a wonderfully simple method of keeping the data regarding who’s at work and who’s not in a single, understandable, and easy to locate place.

Going to the other extreme, we have quite a few “Diaryless Users”. Whereas with the “Staff Holiday” diary, we see a resource that’s accessed by all and sundry, but not really owned by anyone, our “Diaryless Users” are users who spend their time working with other people’s diaries, but have no diary of their own. The best examples we’ve come across of these are in businesses where one set of employees book appointments for a separate set of employees. It’s an age-old business dynamic - my chimney sweep’s been working this way for over thirty five years (although clearly not with MyOffice, as that would make the system older than me, not to mention the internet!). In this case, we tend to see office staff set up as users with diaries of their own (they don’t need them, as they’re almost always in the office taking calls, and arranging jobs), but with write access to the staff who actually go out on site and do the deed, whereas the site workers will have their own diaries which they can see, but no access to anyone elses diaries.

The final regularly-encountered example is the “Diary for a Resource” setup. From what we can gather via support, there doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern regarding which businesses do this. However, why it’s done is extremely clear. The diaries are being used to record who’s got access to a given resource at a given time - meeting rooms, classrooms, vehicles in car pools, even floor space in a garage - the list of resource types is pretty endless, and some of the creativity shown by businesses with regards to how they organise their resource booking setups has been both impressive and surprising.

Having said all that, it’s also pretty common to be asked for help when it comes to setting up diaries for each user. If that’s your aim, as in a good few cases it will be, then once you’ve created your new user(s), you’ll have to into the Diary Admin window (in the main Diary window, open the “Tools” menu, then click “Diary Admin”) and create a diary for them. For a fuller description of how to accomplish this, the “How to Share Diaries” page on the main MyOffice should give you a better idea of what to do.

Q) How do you start a fight between the members of the MyOffice team?

A) Point at the screen and say “That, my friend, isn’t a Diary, it’s a Calendar!”.

It works every time, I promise you, so much so that in-house debates as to whether “the things you put appointments in” are diaries or calendars are virtually banned. I therefore present to you the standard in-house arguments. First, in the blue corner, the defending champion…

Diary

A quick dive into the Compact Oxford English Dictionary gives us the following definition :

• noun (pl. diaries) 1. a book in which one keeps a daily record of events and experiences.
2. a book marked with each day’s date, in which to note appointments.

Ah, well there’s the problem straight away. Our friend the dictionary has dived straight in with the “Dear Diary” definition, and quite clearly, that’s not what MyOffice is about. Something tells me that Samuel Pepys wouldn’t have gone down in history in quite the same way had his diary consisted of a series of reminders about meetings in coffee houses, and the annual chore of getting the fire extinguishers checked, just in case, or that Allison Moyet was on about a note to “Meet Ali for a beer after work” in the chorus of “Nobody’s Diary”. No, MyOffice definately isn’t that kind of diary.

It is, however, the kind of diary mentioned in definition number two. Okay, so it’s not a book, but it does provide for the creation of lots “thingies” in which to make a record of planned future events. In that sense, the “thing with appointments in it” is most definately a diary. It’s a diary in the same sense that the black leather-covered A4 sized book that lived in the corner of the office and contained the dates of significant events for the company was a diary, and that my Gran used a diary to make a note of who she was supposed to having coffee with next week. Hers, however, was smaller, had a gold cover, and didn’t come as an annual free gift from the office supplies company. No, the diary module is correctly named, because it does the “stuff” that businesses do with their diaries, and MyOffice is aimed squarely at business customers.

So diary it is.

Calendar

Oh no it isn’t! It’s a calendar. Look in the top left corner of the so-called diary window and there’s even a control that looks like a calendar! Even better, click on the Month View button and two thirds of the screen is taken up by something which any rational English-speaker would describe as “a calendar”.

• noun 1 a chart or series of pages showing the days, weeks, and months of a particular year. 2 a system by which the beginning, length, and subdivisions of the year are fixed. 3 a list or schedule of special days, events, or activities.

Well, it would appear the Compact Oxford’s come out well and truely in favour of the challenger, Calendar. There’s nothing there to suggest a calendar is anything other than a thingy one uses to plan and record future events. Not even a whiff of “What I did at the weekend”, “I’ve just met this really hot girl”, or a vivid account of London ablaze from end to end. Doesn’t get much more conclusive than that, does it? We must have got it wrong. They’re not diaries, they are calendars after all.

But not so fast…

When was the last time someone told you they’d “make a note of it on their calendar”? Quite a long time ago, I suspect. For proof of this one, next time you get your car serviced, have a look at any calendars on the wall. The servicing department don’t keep a list of all the cars they’ve got booked in on them, that’s for sure. No, those lists are, if not computerised, in something which you’d be hard pressed to call anything other than a diary. Try the same with a hair-dressers, or a doctor’s surgery. The receptionist certainly doesn’t lean against the wall and scribble “Mr. Pepys, ingrown toenails, Dr. Smith, 4pm” under next July’s member of the World’s Twelve Cutest Kittens. No, she puts it in the doctor’s diary. The list of real-world examples lined up against calendar, and in favour of diary is endless, so I’ll not bore you any further with bizarre images of driving instructors unfolding A1 wall calendars in their Nissans Micras, or teachers planning parents evenings in half an inch of space by pinching the microscopes from the biology store-room. No, quite simply, they’re not calendars.

Okay, so they’re diaries. Why all this Calendar talk?

Without beating around the bush, quite simply, it’s a “Sales n’ Marketing” problem. Whilst it’s not exactly hard to make the connection between calendars and diaries in the context of MyOffice, and given the way the diary window’s laid out, we could call them absolutely anything within the product and 99% of people would still suss out “it’s a thing to put future events in”, the problem comes when potential customers are presented with the word for the first time.

The problem word is most definately ‘diary’. In the minds of an awful lot of people, it conjours up an image of a blog, and we do pick up and awful lot of traffic from the search engines where the search terms show pretty clearly the visitor is looking for just that.

So, what do you think? Are we right to call “them” diaries, or should they be calendars? Would changing the name cause untold confusion, or doesn’t it really matter?