Calendar:WCAP Guide
Accessing Your Calendar
To access your calendar data, perform the following steps in Lightning:
- File → New → Calendar...
- Choose Remote
- Choose Sun Java System Calendar Server (WCAP)
- Enter the URL of your calendar server, e.g. http://sd-calendar.staroffice.de/
- Choose Name and Color
- Provide your login data
- Depending on the server configuration you may see warnings regarding unsecure login or certificate mismatches. For security reasons it is always tried to use a secure connection to the server (i.e. via
HTTPS). However, not every server is properly configured.
You can use the Calendar menu from the menubar to switch between various views.
Enhanced (prototype) WCAP UI
Some notes about the prototypical (WCAP) UI reflecting WCAP specific features.
Creating Events
Before modifying your server based calendar make sure that its name is selected in the list of calendars in the lower left pane and that the check mark is set as well. Otherwise you may modify your Home calendar only which is stored locally but not on a calendar server.
If you do not need the Home calendar because you are using the server based calendar only, you can safely delete it. This will avoid that you accidentally edit the wrong calendar. To delete the Home calendar select it and press the Delete button.
Opening the event dialog
New events can be created by
- double-clicking on the corresponding day in the month view
- dragging with the mouse in the day- or week-view, thereby defining the start and end time
- choosing File → New → Event... in main menu
To edit an existing event just double-click it on any view.
Recurring events
Recurring rules can be edited on the Recurrence tab of the event dialog (double-click an existing event). There is a preview in the dialog that displays all occurrences resulting from the rule.
All Day events
Events that last the whole day can be created by checking the All Day box close to the time entry fields. Note that those events will be ignored when calculating your free/busy information.
Privacy settings
If you want to create events in your calendar where nobody should be able to read the event details, you have to mark an event as Time and Date Only. This can be done using the Privacy drop-down on the Event page of the dialog.
If you want to hide the complete event, you have to mark it as Private. This also implies that it will be ignored when calculating your free/busy information for other users.
Alarms
If you set an alarm for your event, the calendar server will send out a reminder email at the specified time. The email will be send to the address(es) configured in the web frontend of the calendar server. Future versions will allow to specify the email address in this dialog as well.
Creating tasks
In order to display your tasks in the views (Day-, Week-, Month View) you may want to enable this by selecting Calendar → View → Tasks in View from the main menu. Also make sure to at least set a start Date, if you want your tasks to appear in the month view (a due date only is not sufficient) #349529. If start and end date are specified, tasks appear in all views.
However all tasks are permanently displayed in the Agenda and Todo tabpage of the Calendar sidebar at your left hand side.
Unfortunately the Todo tab page may display a little crowded if you intensively work with todos as Lightning currently lacks the ability to hide completed tasks or sort them #316789. Also there is currently no UI available to delete a task, but a simple Delete or Backspace from your keyboard removes a selected task without further inquiry.
Creation of tasks is currently only possible by either selecting File → New → Task from the main menu or via double click into some free space on the Todo tabpage of the sidebar. The latter may not work for you, if your sidebar is crowded as described above. Creation of tasks via context menu in the views is currently missing. As a consequence the task dialog initially defaults to the current day and time for the start and end date of a task, which in most cases is not what you want!
In order to configure a recurring rule for the todo, make sure to at least explicitly mark the check box in front of the start time and set it to an appropriate value.
Inviting attendees from the (corporate) addressbook
You need to configure your Thunderbird address book to use an LDAP directory:
- Choose Tools → Address Book
- In the Address Book choose File → New → LDAP Directory
- Fill in LDAP specifics
- Close the Address Book
- Choose Tools → Options → Composition → Addressing
- Check the directory server and open the drop down list to select the LDAP server - Note: due to a bug (at least in TB 1.5.0.x), you need have the entry selected and focussed before closing the dialog
- Press Ok.
Open an existing event or create a new one and go to the Attendees tabpage. Now start typing the first letters of a person you want to invite. The name should be auto completed. If you save the changes an invitation will be sent out from the calendar server.
Scheduling meetings using free/busy information
If all attendees of a meeting are using the same calendar server you can use free/busy information to find an empty time slot.
To schedule a meeting you create a new event at the planned day and time. In the event dialog open the attendee page. Because you are the organizer of the meeting your name is already listed but grayed out. Nevertheless, you can add yourself to the attendee list.
Now add additional attendees by entering their email addresses in the attendee list. The free/busy grid will immediately display free times using green and busy times using red markers.
A bar in the time line above the free/busy grid displays the event. If the current slot conflicts with other events you can choose Next/Previous slot to move the event to the next or previous free time slot, taking the schedule of the organizer and of all attendees into account.
The free/busy grid can be scrolled by using the scroll bar below or by using the Previous/Next hour push buttons.