Department Calendar has a host of features, but one of my personal favorites is the at-a-glance chart function shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B


You can see everyone's schedule at once. Roll over picture for a larger image.

With one glance, it's possible to see who's doing what, where, throughout the organization. This, in my opinion, is a winner and may, alone, make the product a worthwhile buy.

Finally, you can schedule meetings and view your calendar from your BlackBerry or Windows Mobile smartphone, as shown in Figure C.

FIGURE C


Know where you're supposed to be while on the go. Roll over picture for a larger image.

This is an important feature, but we'd like to see it more generalized, adding support at least for the wildly over-hyped but getting more and more entrenched iPhone and for other smartphones like the Palm Treo and various Symbian phones.

Department Calendar is an enterprise-class product and, as such, there's no way I'll be able to cover all the nuanced features in a single review. Instead, let's see how the customers actually using the product liked it.

Customer impressions
We asked four Notes admins using Department Calendar across 11 servers what they thought of the product. Two, Keith Ryan and Greg Stover, gave me permission to use their names in the review. The other two were encumbered by their company's disclosure policies, so we'll just call them Bill and Ted (not their real names), but they're most excellent names nonetheless.

We found that user satisfaction trended quite high. We asked all four if this was a product they liked to use (some calendar programs are a chore). More important, we asked them how their users took to the product. We wanted to know if they found themselves forcing or cajoling users into making use of Department Calendar or whether users immediate saw usefulness and used it right away.

For both of these questions, all four members of our panel reported that they liked the product, and their users gravitated to it quite quickly. Bill reported, "Adds a lot of value by making the task of 'finding' someone simple. Department events are actually well-attended as everyone knows about them now."

We then asked each admin which feature in Department Calendar he liked best. Bill liked direct entry, department-level events, and side-by-side group calendaring. Ted found that time-off requests, a consolidated calendar, and posting events were most valuable to him.

Keith Ryan also liked the time-off request feature, as well as having centralized calendar information for teams, and he reported "ease of use" as a major value. And, finally, Greg Stover told us he liked the product's flexibility, ease of administration, and integration with existing mail servers.

As in all reviews, we also try to dig in and find the problems that might trip you up. Among this group of production users of Department Calendar, only Bill had any negatives to report. He told us there were "Somewhat limited view options, but not bad" and the product has "Room for improvement, but does very well".

Finally, it was time to rate the product on the famous ZATZ 0-5 scale. The conclusion here was easy, since each of member of our evaluation group gave the product a four out of five rating. When asked why, Ted reported "Support has been great, we've had help on weekends" and the product "hasn't caused any problems with Domino". Keith told us he liked how the product was easy to configure, simple to use, and had good documentation.

So what was the overall impression? Keith Ryan summed up his experience with Department Calendar:

Unlike many third party applications in Notes, this is truly a set it and forget it tool. I rarely have an issue with it, so I don't invest a lot of time in adjusting it. Since we auto-populate groups in our NAB from PeopleSoft and Department Calendar membership can be based on a group, I don't even worry about keeping the members up to date. I love it.

Our own Larry wasn't so thrilled, "Now I have to go to meetings. My excuses don't work anymore." Too bad, Larry. Too bad.

OUR RATING: 4 of 5

Heather McDaniel is unique because she has experience in three important fields--real estate, handheld computing, and personal success coaching. She holds a real estate license in both Hawaii and New Jersey. Prior to starting her own personal success coaching business dedicated to helping people reach their goals, Heather is the news editor and former sales manager for ZATZ, publishers of this magazine. She's widely acknowledged as a leading expert on the handheld industry. For a free coaching session, contact Heather at heather@coachheather.com or visit http://www.coachheather.com.