The crm.me combined calendar is a calendar with a difference, it's simple and very flexible.  As you would expect, it displays your meetings and tasks plotted out on monthly, weekly or daily views but it goes much further, allowing you to create granular custom calendars with a wide range of filters, and share those calendars with other users in your team.

This article will introduce you to the crm.me combined Calendar and give you some examples of how it can be used to expose and share data on a calendar like never before.

Combined Calendar

The combined calendar allows you and your users to create and share multiple different calendars and overlay them all on a single display.  So now staff can share and overlay their calendars to quickly identify a time when they are all free to get together for that impromptu sales meeting.  The unique filtering system also allows users the flexibility to create custom calendars. For example you may want to create a calendar plotting all open Tasks by their Due date for users in your immediate sales team.  Well now you can do that and share it with your team so that they too can benefit from your thoughtful use of the calendar.

Accessing the calendar

You will now see a new icon in the top right of the screen. Click the icon from anywhere in crm.me to access your combined calendar.

Don't see the icon? Its possible that your user does not have permission to access the shared calendar feature.  You can request access from your crm.me administrator.

My Calendars

Once on the Calendar screen, you will see a couple of calendar views already available to check on "My Meetings" and "My Tasks". 

Moving over the Gear icon next to each of your Calenders will bring up options to Edit or Delete the calendar.  You can create additional calendar views by clicking on the + symbol next to "My Calendars".

Any additional calendars you create will appear in your list of My Calendars, each will display in its own color when plotted on the combined display.  You can choose to show or hide each calendar by checking it on and off.

Creating a new calendar

You can create as many different calendar views as you wish.  When creating a new calendar you will need to give it a name, select the module (Products, Meetings, Tasks) and set the start and end attribute fields from the dropdowns.  In this example I will show all Products sold (Status = Won) plotting them by the date that the product records were sold (Date Modified). 

Since I only want to show products that were sold I scroll further down and include a filter to show only products where the Stage equals "Won".  Once I am happy with my filters I click save.

For even greater control if you have multiple filters on your calendar these can be linked by a search operator.  By default, your filters will filter to meet all the requirements of the filters listed (AND):

This can be modified for more advanced filtering, so you can change the requirements to meet filter #1 AND either filter #2 or filter #3:

Sharing and Subscribing to calendars

When creating or editing a calendar, you can set the Read and write permissions to allow other users access.  If I set the read and write permissions for my calendar to "Everyone" then any crm.me user will be able to subscribe to the calendar I have created and include it on their own combined calendar.

Rights and permissions you set here only define who can subscribe to the to the calendar. Users viewing the same calendar may see more or less events based on their security restrictions.  I.e. Jill will not be able to view meetings on a calendar where her user has no access to those records.

You can subscribe to calendars other users have chosen to share by clicking the + symbol next to "My Shared Calendars", doing so opens the Shared Calendars pop up.  Search for and subscribe to any of these calendars by simply selecting them from the list.  These will now show in your My Shared Calendars list and can be toggled on and off.

Other users subscribing to the calendar will show along side it in the list so you can see who else has it added.  You can unsubscribe from a shared calender by moving over the Gear icon and selecting the unsubscribe option.

Month/Week/Day views

You can toggle between Monthly, Weekly and Daily views by clicking the buttons on the top right of the screen.  Weekly and Daily views will display items in order of their Start time attribute.  Items that have just a Start date rather than a specific time will be listed as all day events.

Viewing Extra Detail

Clicking on any item in the calendar will display the extra details modal window which will show additional information about the record. Moving over the Gear icon will provide options to navigate to the detail or edit view of the record.

Viewing More Events

On the Month view a maximum of 5 items can be displayed on any one day.  If there are more than 5 items, a More Events link is displayed.  Clicking More Events allows you to view all events for that day in a pop-up window like the one shown below.