Alex around the World

The organization I work for trying to set up some sort of editorial board whose main task would be to identify internal news items and plan their publication on the organizational website’s main page.Until now, we’ve been using an excel sheet to centralize information about when a news item should be posted on the home page and when it should be removed. It’s a rather “manual” way of doing and it’s becoming more and more difficult to keep the calendar up-to-date and share the information efficiently.I’m currently exploring new possibilities or rather new tools that we could use. The tool (preferably an online calendar) should meet these minimum requirements:

• calendar should be private and its access restricted to a group of users (more or less 10);
• one or more editors should be able to update it.
• events will generally last more than 1 day (over a 15-days period), remember, it’s to indicate how long a news item should be posted on the home page.
• it should be web-based, for easy access and update.
• function that sends out reminders or update alerts to groups members should also be available.

This list is not exhaustive but, as far as I can see, should be the minimum requirements.I’ve tested a few available tools and done some research on the internet (Lotus Notes’s integrated calendar, Trumba, calendarhub and kiko). Here’s a little comparison chart:

¹ Lotus Notes (release 6.5.4)² Calendarhub.com³ Trumba.com⁴ Kiko.comBased on my little analysis, CalendarHub and Trumba seems to best meet our needs. Nevertheless, the big difference between those two apps is the price (the former is free - worth +1 point, the latter costs 40 USD, which has to be multiplied in our case by the number of user: 10). Thus, the advantage goes to Calendarhub as far as the price is concerned. But, Trumba has some nice advanced features and, most important in our case, it shows the calendar items as a continuation (fig. 1) , not as recurrent items (fig. 2).

Fig. 1: events taking place for more than 1 day are shown as a single item

Fig. 2: events seem to be recurrent and not indicated as uniqueIn fact, what we need is a mix between Calendarhub and Trumba. Let’s see what my boss thinks about it.Does someone has other tools to suggest?