A couple of weeks ago, I posted about how you can build a dynamic calendar to manage your volunteer opportunities in Salesforce. After a lot of great feedback (thanks, Salesforce Foundation!), this week we’re taking a look at how to use those same dynamic calendars for scheduling conference events and sessions using Cloudforce NYC 2011 as an example!
Force.com Labs has a handy app for event management called Eventforce, which you can grab from the AppExchange for free. And layering on CalendarAnything takes it to the next level and makes it easy to create custom calendars to show Sessions by Track, Sessions by Room, or even all sessions for the Event!
Creating the Event
First things first, I created a record called Cloudforce NYC 2011 as the central portal for my Event and added all the specifics about the target attendance, event vision, and budget for my conference:
Creating the Venue and Adding Rooms
Once I created the Event, I added its confirmed Venue, which was the Javits Center in NYC this year. I also added related records for each of the rooms in which I planned to schedule breakout sessions:
Creating Tracks and Scheduling Sessions
After creating entries for the rooms, I first created two tracks (the Service Cloud track and the Force.com Developer track) and then started scheduling out my sessions and relating them to their appropriate track and level of expertise. I also tentatively assigned them to rooms so I can go back later and make sure I haven’t double-booked any single resource room!
Building and Viewing Event Calendars
And finally, after I have created the sessions for my event, I can build calendars to visualize my entire event! In the example below, I’ve built calendars by track so that I can see how users interested in the Force.com Developer track might engage with my event schedule. I could also build calendars by resource room to easily spot double-booked rooms or double-booked speakers!
And if you want to get even fancier, stay tuned for how you can roll out CalendarAnything to your partners via the Salesforce partner portal!
Want a free license so you can try CalendarAnything out on your own?
Just send us an email or tweet and we’ll hook it up!
