Creighton’s Homegrown Calendaring System Is One of a Kind
by Mark Crawford
Sometimes you don’t have to travel too far from your front door to find what you are looking for.
In fact, sometimes you don’t even have to go outside.
That’s what Brian Young, vice president of information technology at Creighton University, realized when he wanted to solve an aggravating problem with online calendar systems around campus.
“The wide array of online calendar systems used by individual schools, colleges, programs, and campus groups here at Creighton caused confusion, event overlap, and even double-booking,” states Young. “What we really needed was a simple, single calendar that would give us a total picture for all academic, student, athletic, and campus events occurring on any given day.”
Convinced he had the creative talent within his own Division of Information Technology (DoIT), Young issued an “in-house” challenge to find the solution — an approach that, if successful, would improve efficiency and communication, as well as save lots of time and money by not bringing in outside consultants. Within a few weeks, Application Architect Damien Holzapfel, Senior Director-Enterprise Applications Stuart Zimmerman, and Project Manager-Enterprise Applications Tadd Martin delivered the winning solution.
“We focused on making the calendar simple, yet powerful, and above all, user-friendly,” says Martin. “Everything, from the look of the calendar to the entry of events, was built around the user interface. It’s really easy to use because all the hard stuff, such as contextual-based searching and embedded coding to convert text into hyperlinks, is performed by the application.”
The greatest challenge was sorting through each group’s individual requirements and weighing the needs of the group versus the overall benefit to the university.
“A good example of this occurred during the launch of the calendar,” says Zimmerman. “In a short amount of time every group on campus had its own presence on the calendar. Very quickly the calendar had the look/feel of being very cluttered. Over the next two months we held meetings with key individuals from groups on campus and were successful in establishing a set of 10 categories that encompassed every event that could possibly be displayed on the calendar.”
Demonstrating just how quickly an in-house solution can move, the initial idea was presented in October 2007 and the production version of the “BlueSkies Calendar™” was launched in August 2008. The software was developed with the idea that other institutions would have similar calendar struggles, and would be interested in purchasing the system from Creighton. To cover this likelihood, the system was designed as an enterprise-level application, on enterprise database, and accompanied by enterprise-level support.
Recognizing the strong market potential for the calendar, Creighton’s Intellectual Resources Management (IRM) office guided the development team through the patent process.
“We are also assisting them with licensing agreements to present to potential customers,” says Mary Ann Wendland, associate director of IRM.
Another Jesuit university recently contacted Creighton DoIT about the possibility of purchasing the BlueSkies Calendar™ to solve similar calendaring needs. So far the application has been licensed to two universities “and both are reporting a great deal of success and sending us letters of recommendation,” says Martin.
Current and potential clients are impressed with the simplicity of the user interface and word is spreading quickly.
“People continue to tell us we have a powerful communication tool,” adds Zimmerman. “A number of institutions across the country are currently looking at the product.”
More interested parties probably will be talking about it in November at the EduCause Conference in Denver, where DoIT representatives will give a presentation on the BlueSkies Calendar™.
The success of this in-sourcing effort has led to a rearrangement of resources which has now doubled the size of the development team on campus that is creating innovative applications. Meanwhile the team is hard at work developing the next version of the calendar, which will have additional functionality that goes beyond being an event-notification system.
“We are seeing a great need for the BlueSkies calendaring system in universities across the country,” says Wendland. “It’s also an excellent solution for nonprofit and for-profit organizations that have many scheduled events, such as cities, churches, public schools, and large companies with multiple branch locations around the world.”
“Our project shows that if individuals are motivated with the proper initiatives, and are provided with an adequate window of time, excellent software applications can be developed if the right team is trusted and supported by the entire organization,” says Martin. “The BlueSkies Calendar™ is representative of the continuing innovation occurring at Creighton University, in technology as well as teaching and patient care.”