CiviCalendar is one of the first extensions Agiliway has developed for CiviCRM. The last version of the CiviCalendar extension has already had a lot of beneficial features facilitating work in the system. In particular,
- CiviCalendar dashlet could be installed on the Home dashboard so that users could have immediate access to their planned events, cases and activities;
- Users could choose to view all the plans for a day, a week, or a month. In addition, they could choose between viewing them on a calendar chart or in a list;
- The option of hiding past plans allowed taking the distracting information away from the calendar and leaving out of unsocial hours helped to avoid extra spaces in a calendar;
- New activities could be created directly from the Calendar;
- The Calendar allowed previewing events available in the Calendar to get the most important information, and
- The date and time format could be customized to match users’ country standards.
Although the above-mentioned features exceed by far users' expectations, Agiliway has found the way to make the extension even more useful and added more features CiviCRM users can benefit from.
Wider Filter Options in CiviCalendar
One of the new features is a wider range of filter options. Namely, users of the earlier version of CiviCalendar could choose to filter calendar entries by types such as cases, events and activities. The new version of CiviCalendar allows to filter all calendar entries in such a way, that users get particular events, cases and activities displayed to them. For example, users may choose to view only the event of a particular type or only activities where they are assigned a particular role.
Overall, there are 7 different filter parameters now: event type, event participant status, case type, case status, activity type, activity status and role in an activity. The choice within each option depends on individual settings of each CiviCRM system.
Contact Calendar Sharing
Another feature we have added is Contact Calendar Sharing. It allows displaying calendar entries of up to 5 other users simultaneously. Unlike other Calendar features, Contact Calendar Sharing is accessible not from the Calendar, but from the Contacts submenu. Such solution was necessary to effectively manage permission rights. For example, it is possible to give the permission to view the calendars of employees only to the manager. This way, the manager may be aware of all the activity of the organisation and, thus, improve its performance.
To make it easy for managers to choose the right contact, whose plans and activities they want to be displayed in their calendars, contacts’ avatars are displayed next to their names. The avatars may also be seen in the very CiviCalendar entries next to the contact’s activity, case or event for a given day and time.
Better CiviCalendar View
Although the users of CiviCalendar extension by Agiliway appreciate the ability to easily distinguish between various types of plans by colour, long bright lines seemed to attract too much attention and actually distracted when CiviCalendar was placed on a Dashboard. Thankfully, our designer has managed to provide a solution by creating a new sleek style for this feature.
Before
After
The new features developed by Agiliway effectively complement the functionality of CiviCalendar. In particular, the option of filtering calendar entries by 7 parameters not only improves visibility of plans in a calendar, but allows searching for a particular case, activity or event. Contact Calendar Sharing, in its turn, facilitates agreement of plans and effective management of an organizational activity. In addition, the design of the CiviCalendar has become sleeker retaining the much appreciated feature of color being used to distinguish between types of plans. To benefit from CiviCalendar with all its great features, install the updated CiviCalendar extension on your CiviCRM server.
