November 25th Open House Summary

Thanks to all who made it out to our first Open House! Despite the rainy weather, we were glad to share our awesome new space here at the Centre for Student Involvement with you, and to show you what we’re proud of, and what we’re working on, for UBCevents.

There were many of you who couldn’t make it out due to scheduling or other reasons — we’re sorry to have missed you! Here’s a brief overview of what we discussed:

Recent Features Added to UBCevents

• Sharing Events: the “Share/Download” button at the top right-hand corner of every UBCevents Event Listing page allows you — or, more importantly, anyone who’s interested in your event — to share your event through tools like Twitter or Facebook, or to download the information to their calendaring software such as iCal, Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook.
• Our blog: this refers to the very blog you’re reading right now! To help us connect and stay in touch with so many different groups on UBC’s campuses (as well as a great number off the main campuses as well!), we’ve set-up this blog up as an easier way for you to get a sense of we’re doing between open houses and e-mails to us. Our goal with UBCevents is to be as valuable a tool for every group using the calendar as possible, and to continually be engaged in getting better at doing this and finding out what you and your group are trying to achieve.
• Departmental Calendaring: this feature is an arrangement we’ve started to pursue with some groups on campus —  speaking with those who attended our Open House made us realize just how important it is for many of you! It is a large and slightly complex topic, so instead of explaining it here, we will do a more fleshed-out post in the weeks to come on what this feature is, as well as how to get in touch with us here at UBCevents if you believe it is right for you.

Features on the Horizon

• Statistics: with our backend team at IT, we’ve started to get interesting numbers on how many users are using our website to view events, as well as how people are using the sharing features (mentioned above). It was great to get feedback on how useful this feature could be and how it could be integrated into the existing UBCevents administrative interface.
• RSS Generator: this is a web-based tool to replace the RSS Guide we currently have available, for people wanting to integrate their websites with UBCevents. This tool guides you through step-by-step prompts, then gives you the code which you can use to integrate the events you want on your website. We think this will save at least a headache or two and we hope this will be available in the not-too-distant future!
• UBC Blogs Integration: this is a feature we’re really excited about. We’re exploring ways to give UBC Blogs users the ability to easily and quickly put their own, or others’, events from around UBC, into dynamic widgets on their sites. We’ll definitely keep you up-to-date on how this goes!
• CalDAV: this would allow anyone interested in one or several calendars on UBCevents, the ability to subscribe to calendars in tools like iCal, Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook.

Warren and I were glad to get a chance to hear upfront from those who were able to attend, how they were using the calendar now as well as how they wanted to use it in the future. If any of the items here look interesting to you, feel free to get in touch with us at info.events@ubc.ca, or to leave a comment, and let us know your thoughts on what would make UBCevents!