Events Calendar - detailed guidelines

1. Make sure your event is not already on the calendar.
   Before entering an event, make sure the event wasn't entered by another group. Making this a habit will help us avoid duplicate entries. It is possible that an event may be created under a different title than you'd expect. Because you can only edit events added by your group, if you'd like to change an existing event created by a different group, you'll need to contact the original poster (use the contact information attached to the event).
   
   
2. Any time you want to post an event to the calendar, make sure that you do so as a brand-new event; DO NOT edit/update an existing one.  Morning Mail requires all incoming entries to have unique ID numbers, so if you simply update an existing event, while its CONTENT may be different, its ID NUMBER will be the same as that of the original, and so Morning Mail won’t see the event as being new and it won’t get pulled into the queue so it can be tagged to go out.
   
   
3. The calendar interface now offers three different Morning Mail-related tags you can use to indicate that you would like to have that particular event appear in Morning Mail.  Just select the ONE most appropriate tag for students, faculty/staff, or the general campus community; if you don’t apply one of these tags to your event, it won’t be pulled into the Morning Mail queue at all so it can be tagged to go out. Again, just remember to just choose the ONE most appropriate Morning Mail tag.
   
   
4. Both the event's start and end times are in 24-hour/military format, so, for example, make sure that an event that starts at 2:00 in the afternoon gets entered as 14 00, and not as 02 00.
   
   
5. The event's description is limited to only 500 characters (including spaces), so you'll have to keep the description to a minimum here.  (And remember, you won't have to re-enter date, time, or location information in the description field, as there are other fields for providing this information.)  You can always enter a URL in the "Event URL" field to point users back to your website, or some other location where they can find more complete information about the event.
   
   
6. It’s helpful to post your events with fairly descriptive titles.  The other Morning Mail curator and I can always tweak the titles as necessary before they go out in Morning Mail.
   
   
7. Keep in mind that just because your event might show up immediately on the campus events calendar, that doesn't mean that it will also show up just as quickly in the Morning Mail queue.  It can sometimes take Morning Mail several hours to go around and sniff out the most recent news items from all of its designated sources, so if you want an announcement to go out at least a few days in advance of your upcoming event, the sooner you can post an event to the calendar, the better. Don’t wait until the last minute!

   
   On a related note, please note that just because a calendar event gets pulled into the Morning Mail queue, that doesn't mean that it will automatically show up in the next edition of Morning Mail, either.  All Morning Mail release dates are manually entered.
   
   

8. The calendar uses a 21-day "rolling window" to automatically pull events from the calendar and into the queue of potential Morning Mail articles, but once something has been pulled into Morning Mail, there is no way for the curator to know of any changes that may be made to a calendar event.  So, if you ever find that you have to change or outright cancel a calendar entry up to 21 days prior to the actual event, please be sure to submit an ITSSC ticket so that one of the Web Services folks can try to assist you and make the appropriate changes in the Morning Mail entry.  (Of course, there's also the chance that the announcement may have already gone out, in which case someone would have to go in and manually change the Morning Mail item to reflect the new information, and then re-post it.)

    

   However, just as an example, let's say you make another calendar entry for an event in mid-June, and then discover in the next few days that you need to make some sort of change.  In that case, you could simply go ahead and make the necessary changes to the calendar entry.  Because the event is taking place more than 21 days from now, the edited entry won't be picked up by the calendar's rolling window or come through the potential Morning Mail line-up.
   
   

9. Please remember that each calendar entry should reflect ONLY the actual date(s) of the event itself, and NOT the date that you post an event to the calendar, or want it to "start appearing;" the event should appear on the calendar almost immediately, as soon as you click on the "Add Event" button.  Think of it this way:  Let's say you call in mid-May to make a medical appointment for October 12, and you want to make a note of it on your calendar.  You wouldn't put the event in your calendar the day you made the appointment and then repeat the same entry in your calendar every day between now and then; you'd just make one single entry in your calendar on October 12....the actual date of your appointment.  Hope that makes sense.
   
   

10. When posting your events, DO NOT use the "Academic Calendar" tag, as doing this will cause your events to erroneously appear on the actual academic calendar for the campus (see https://info.rpi.edu/registrar/academic-calendar/ ).  Also, please limit the use of your tags to only reflect the subject matter, type, source/department, and/or theme of the event itself, and NOT the audience you're trying to reach or who you think might be interested.  Those same tags can be used for searching purposes within the calendar, so if you apply too many different tags to an event and a user then searches for a specific subject, it's possible their search results would include your event as a sort of false positive, even though it has nothing at all to do with the subject of their initial search.
    
    

11. When adding a new event, it's a good idea that you make sure to populate all of the various calendar fields before you click on the "Add Event" button, and always remember to go back to the main calendar at http://events.rpi.edu to make sure your event is appearing there correctly.  If it isn't there, you know you will need to go back in and try posting your event again.  (Remember, if an event doesn't show up on the calendar, it isn't going to get pulled into the Morning Mail queue, either.)

     

    On a related note, when you look at your newly-posted calendar entry, check carefully for any odd "\n" line break characters which may appear in the description field, as these may have been brought over as the result of copy-and-pasting your content from a Word document into the event's description field, or if you enter line breaks in your event's Description field.  If you do see these characters in the calendar entry, please go back in and edit the event as needed to remove them, as they would ultimately get pulled into the Morning Mail entry as well.
    
    

12. If for some reason you find that you do ever need to cancel an event, please DO NOT delete the entry from the calendar altogether, but simply log back into the interface and change the event's status from "confirmed" to "canceled." Completely deleting an event from the calendar will break any existing links between a Morning Mail entry and the original calendar posting.
    
    Only totally delete events that are truly erroneous, such as those that were posted to the calendar by accident.
    
    
    

13. Calendar admins been experiencing serious issues with events labeled as "ongoing" or "recurring," in that they don’t seem to be getting pulled into the Morning Mail queue at all. So, at this point, DO NOT use the “ongoing” or “recurring” tag for your events. If you have multiple events that need to go on the calendar and that recur on a regular basis (such as every week at the same time), it’s probably best to post each of them individually, even though doing so will take longer.

If you have any questions about publishing events to the calendar, please submit an online request via ITSSC; we'll be happy to help.

1. Avoid duplicating locations, and check first to see if the location you need is already there. (To do this, log into the system and click on the Manage Locations icon to display a list of existing locations.)
2. Use standard Rensselaer room codes where possible (e.g. DCC 308) in the address field.
3. Place the street address in the subaddress field; be as specific as possible. You do not need to include a street address for locations on Rensselaer's Troy campus. 
   
   

1. Avoid duplicating contacts, and check first to see if the contact you need is already there. (To do this, log into the system and click on the Manage Contacts icon to display a list of existing contact individuals and departments.)
   
   
2. When adding contacts, add groups such as "Athletics" or "DotCIO" rather than individuals such as "John Doe."  That way, anyone who has a question about the event will know which group or department to contact if the individual person is out of the office. However, if you do need to direct users to a particular individual for a specific event, use the "description" field to elaborate on that.
   
   You may wish, however, to include the name of the individual whose phone number is listed. Do this by adding the name to the contact's " Additional Phone Info" field.
3.  
4. Use only one organization or person when creating a contact; do not combine departments. If several units are sponsoring an event, make a note of it in the event's description, but select only one unit as the contact.
5. In general, don't preface contacts with "Department of" or "Rensselaer." (The Rensselaer Union is an example of a rare departure from this convention.)
6. Please note that contacts' email addresses will not appear in the public calendar interface, in hopes of deterring spammers.