Portsmouth Grammar wanted to allow many staff to add calendar events but also wanted to ensure these got ‘approved. They (along with a number of other schools) also wanted to have events that ‘belonged’ to part or parts of the school. We have made the following changes which are now available to all schools as follows:

To use the approval process go to System variables | Options Others |  and set as appropriate. 

Once set, a new event that has not been approved will appear on the SchoolBase® calendar within the calendar menu highlighted in red. This will NOT then be shown on the portals for parents and pupils etc.

You can restrict who may approve an event by first creating a permission type (System Variables | Permissions) the wording is up to you.  Then in the normal way use staff checks form to allocate this permission to appropriate staff.

The next part of the request was to restrict who sees these and this is on the event creation form as is the permissions. Just click the ‘School Type’ tag and you can then select any part of the school – if no selection is made this will mean the event is for the entire school.

To get these into the portal you still need to tick the distribution and can select any of the four types. Once you select a part of the school, the parent portal and the pupil portal will then only display this event for the appropriate parents and pupils. We have further plans for even greater ‘granularity’ of distribution of calendar items which will eventually be down to an individual. We have also added the school type filter to the reporting process so that you can create calendar reports for different parts of the school.

There is now a facility to import from and export to an Outlook calendar. The export is a button on the Calendar Menu | Reports and the import a button on the Calendar menu itself. Please note that there are functions within Outlook for the import and export of CSVs that this system requires.

At Bedales suggestion, we have added a hue to the calendar to highlight the current week. The calendar was one of our first dot net release objects and will be one of the first in the ‘second time round’ when we have plans for making this much more visual. Obviously the portals have already been improved but again we see much scope for further improvements. Whilst we had it on the operating table a number of minor but annoying features were sorted in such areas as recurring items etc.

We have started a move that will also allow for greater separation of calendar events. In this release we have built the capacity to pass events to pupils and their parents based upon the section of the school they are in. Thus the Junior Sports day need not appear in the senior school calendar. In the example shown below, the event would appear on the pupil and parent portal for all those in the highlighted school types.