Web calendar helps keeps workers in sync

October 17, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

One of the crucial keys in running a successful business is maintaining good communications with all of your employees. As the host of the nationally syndicated radio talk show “Computer America,” I find myself with employees located in different parts of the country.

I’m in North Carolina, my co-host resides in Arizona, the Business TalkRadio Network is in Connecticut, and sundry other employees are in various other locations. And we had a big communications problem.

When my co-host would line up guest appearances for the entire month, he was the only one who knew who they were. Plus it was difficult to maintain and distribute necessary data, such as the guest’s contact number or the details about their products and services.

Too often, for a variety of reasons, we’d find ourselves clueless as to who was coming on the show that very evening. For live broadcast radio, that’s an unnerving position to be in. We needed a better way, and we found it: a Web calendar.

A Web calendar just might be the ideal solution for your business or organization, since it acts as a central repository of information that can be accessed by anyone authorized to do so.

There are hundreds of Web calendars offering many different features and services, with pricing structures ranging from free to very expensive. We decided to go with one called EzWebCalendar.com, which can be viewed at that very URL. EzWebCalendar.com is a multiuser online calendar that makes it easy to share your organization’s schedule and associated documents to anyone who is given access.

EzWebCalendar.com requires no special software to function. Using an ordinary Web browser, you gain access by logging in to your calendar website address and entering your name and password.

What you see on the screen is a standard monthly-view calendar. You can also choose to change the views to be weekly or daily.

Each day that contains information can be highlighted by color. With one glance, all of your staff can immediately see an up-to-the-moment overview of what is scheduled.

In our case, the name of the company or guest is displayed on the calendar. Clicking on any of the names goes to another screen that displays all of the guest’s contact information along with who entered it. That includes all of their phone numbers, topics they might wish to discuss, and any documents they have sent us, such as bios and news releases.

You can attach almost any type of document, such as a Microsoft Word document or a PDF file, by uploading it to the calendar. A link for downloading it will be generated automatically.

Current events and announcements can be listed on the top of the calendar. You can also create categories for the events so that you can filter out events, or you can search for events by name, date or category. A “Resource Scheduler” function lets you allocate resources such as projectors.

EzWebCalendar.com lets you download events to your desktop scheduling software so that it can be imported into Windows’ Outlook or Entourage on Macs.

There’s also a phone-book feature that lets you store multiple phone types and then organize the numbers into a searchable list.

You can try EzWebCalendar.com for the first 15 days at no charge.

Rates based on the number of users and amount of storage space are displayed on EzWebCalendar.com’s website, but prices begin at $9 a month for five users with 10 megabytes of storage.

The company has price breaks for youth groups and nonprofit organizations.

If you have any kind of organization that needs to keep its people on the same track and stay current, you may find that an Internet-based calendar offers the best way to save the day.

Craig Crossman hosts the No. 1 daily national computer radio talk show, Computer America, heard on Business TalkRadio. For more information, visit his website at www.computeramerica.com.

2010, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services