And if you don't like a product, you'll also let us know. If you do like something though, we don't hear from you quite as often. Breaking this trend, we've heard a lot from readers about a Notes-based product called Department Calendar, and the feedback has been universally positive.

With that background in mind, we decided to undertake a review of the product. But there's a gotcha -- Department Calendar is designed for departments, mid-scale to large groups of people using it at once. It's not exactly the sort of thing that tests easily in a lab environment.

We were going to need real users in real departments to test this thing. Fortunately, we were able to talk with four customers who actually have the product in production use. We'll get back to them in a minute.

Introducing Department Calendar
Department Calendar is one of the better named products we've seen. It's, quite obviously, a calendar for departments. Once you think about this, you realize that this introduces a whole host of collaborative features you might not need in your basic PIM calendar.

At its core, Department Calendar provides group scheduling, like you can see in Figure A.

FIGURE A


You can get an overview of the week quite easily. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Beyond basic group scheduling, Department Calendar can help you manage an entire work group's scheduling in one place. For example, the entire group can have access to each others' scheduling information, except for information each member deems private.

Meeting schedules can be set for an individual, a subgroup, or for an entire organization and, as with most calendars, they can be set to repeat. One feature I liked was the department-scaled reminder system. It can be set up to send reminders to everyone who's supposed to attend a meeting, making sure everyone but Larry shows up on time (Larry's got some problems no software program can fix).

One of my favorite group scheduling features seems the most simple, but it's often lacking from scheduling programs: an in/out board. It makes me crazy when I don't know who's in the office or if the reason we can't find Larry (yep, him again) is because he's listening to his iPod or still out to lunch.