The MyOffice Blog

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.