2 replies to this topic

[MassWrestling.com]

Here's how I could imagine solving such a problem:

You act as a clearing house. Workers submit their schedule to you in iCAL formatted files. Depending on that worker's job category, you would import their iCAL file into a subcalendar for his category. Other workers of his category who submit their availability calendars to you would be put in that subcalendar as well.

The heirarchy of calendars would look like this

Main:   Film Industry Worker's Availability Calendar
Sub:		Cameramen
Sub:		Lighting
Sub:		Makeup Artists

Although you might find yourself quite busy frequently accepting iCAL file updates.

BUT....if Trumba ever does add the functionality to overlay public calendar feeds into your Trumba, then you could have this all work automatically (!!!) without bothering with iCAL files every time the workers want to update their calendars. Instead, they send you a public URL to their calendar feed, and they update their calendar and it gets displayed in your sub calendars automatically.

Daniel, on Jun 8 2006, 08:26 AM, said:

I would like to be able to use Trumba to check availabilities of freelance workers in different job categories in my home State, for film production. Primarily the tool will be for Producers (employers) needing to, for example, find any Camera Operators available on or between certain dates.

Therefore, would like a feature that allows a search for "Camera Operator" & "8-8-06 to 10-08-06 (dd/mm/yy)", and then lists any Trumba members available - links to their email and/or web site.

Ideally, the calender will sync with users who have Outlook, but also allow Mac users etc to import their calender information to Trumba.

If the calender is successful/used by the industry locally, then would hope to upgrade to a paid account with an individual doman name / design for the site etc.

I appreciate your advice on whether this is possible. Thank you.

[Jill]

Hi Daniel,
Before I get into how to do what you want to do with Trumba, I'll say that Trumba is really geared toward people who want to publish events that they want people to attend. In my opinion, although I don't really know what the best tool for you would be, I'm not sure that it's Trumba. However, I'll go into how to do what you want to do, just in case. If you do decide to use Trumba, of course any of us are glad to answer questions you have when you're getting up and running.

It is possible to do most of what you want to do with Trumba. For example, with getting the iCal calendars into Trumba, I can add to Mike's post to make his solution work a little differently than importing. That would involve having the people using iCal publish their calendars to the Trumba account, so that the person maintaining the Trumba calendars automatically gets their updates, rather than having to import over and over again. It's similar to a one-way sync from iCal to Trumba, and you can read about it here: Subscribe and publish to iCal. However, it still would involve creating sub calendars for each person in a job category and mixing their schedules into the main category calendar. That could mean a *lot* of calendars in the Trumba account, and each person publishing to iCal needs to have the Trumba sign-in name and password (which means they could also just sign in to Trumba any time). If that's ok with you, it could work just fine. You're welcome to use the free version to set up the multiple calendars for the iCal publish procedures, to see how that would work for you.

To get the Outlook sync tool, you would need to have a paid account. Also, I'm not sure what you need to sync with Outlook, but when you set up the syncing, only the calendar mapped to Outlook is synched, not the calendars that are "mixed in." You'd have to copy events to the main category calendar if you wanted them to sync.

What we don't do is individual/custom domain names, and we don't have plans to offer this in the future. However, you can embed calendars into your own web site. Many of our forum members have embedded calendars in their web sites. If you peruse the Web developer forum, you'll see that many of them have posted links to their sites...

If you want to have practically no Trumba branding, you might want to check out our Partners page on our web site, to see how to get in touch with our marketing people about this. Just to let you know, that would be more expensive than the "off the shelf" $99.95/year account.

I hope that helps.

Jill / Trumba User Assistance