Keeping track of events

Every large or small organization has events that everybody needs to be aware of - as needed. There are many solutions that offer corporate and team calendaring. They all have a drawback: you need buy them and you need to change the way you work (Some are smarter than others). Today I'd like to show you one option how to get a corporate calendar on a shoe string (You need your admin's help for that):

1. Create a new database on the server using mail[yourServerVersion].ntf as template
2. Set the default access to -No access- and [x] Read public documents (don't forget to have a manager access for the database)
3. (Optional): Add a group with -Author access- and [x] Write public documents. They could create new events in that database
4. Go into the profile and set the Owner of the mail file to Corporate Calendar/MyCorp
5. In the calendar profile set the autoprocessing option to "accept initiations even with time conflicts
6. Define a mail-in database in the Domino directory with the name Corporate Calendar/MyCorp pointing to your new database
7. From now on for all events you want to be visible, enter them as meetings and invite Corporate Calendar/MyCorp
8. (Optional): In Notes 8.5 add this calendar to your calendar overlays.

Of course you can have many calendars this way: by department, internal and external events etc. Short of the calendar overlay this possibility has been around since Notes R4.5 when calendars have been introduced into Lotus Notes. Hint for IBMers: you also can use the calendar of a functional ID for this purpose. Getting one of these is a well established process.