After a great deal of work we are delighted to report that Google Calendar will be launched on Monday 25th July. Oracle Calendar will be removed from service on Friday 22nd July and its data will be migrated into Google Calendar in a process lasting the entire weekend. From Monday 25th, your University Google Calendar will be available via the myCalendar link in MUSE.

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Other Universities moving to Google Calendar have required their staff to manually move their own calendars across or start again from scratch. Here in Sheffield we have decided to download, convert and import all staff data between calendars, in a process that takes up to 48 hours.

Migrating the data is a very complex process and we have been testing it over the last month. We are now able to migrate nearly all of the calendar data successfully, but we know that there are a small number of specific circumstances where some data transfers incorrectly or not at all. We urge you to check your calendar to ensure that all your meetings are in place.

In particular we have identified the following issues:

1. Meetings set up an Friday will not be migrated
2. Repeating meetings are migrated as a sequence of unrelated individual meetings and sometimes the initial event is missing
3. Some meetings that you've chosen not to attend are migrated as if you were attending
4. Tasks and attachments are not migrated

A full description of each of these issues, with workarounds, is available via the web page below, which also contains a number of additional minor issues.

Calendar Data Issues and Workarounds

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If you attended the presentation from Google you will have seen that it is possible to designate periods of time for student contact and allow students to select a pre-defined timeslot. This is possible because staff calendars are visible to students and vice-versa. If you would prefer your calendar to not be visible to students you can easily change your sharing settings. Instructions are available via the link below.

Changing your Calendar's Visibility

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To coincide with the launch of Google Calendar, CiCS will be implementing Google Groups for all departments and faculties. This means that each faculty and department will have its own google group making it easy to share calendars and Google documents across the organisation. For information on using these Google Groups see the link below:

Google Groups for Faculties and Departments

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Following migration, Oracle Calendar will be reinstated as a read-only service. It will be available as a right-hand link from the Google Calendar web pages linked below. Oracle Calendar is being made available for a month or two to allow you to check your Google Calendar data and replace any missing meetings. After one month Oracle Calendar will be decommissioned and all data will be destroyed.

If you attempt to set up meetings in Oracle Calendar after migration it will appear to work but the new meetings cannot be saved and will disappear overnight.

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• Google Calendar Launch Date
• Migrated Meetings
• Sharing with Students
• Faculty and Department Groups
• Oracle Switch Off

The CiCS service web page shows planned, potential and actual service failures and maintenance periods. It is updated in office hours 8am-6pm Monday to Friday and also over weekends of significant service maintenance.

CiCS Service Status Page

The CiCS twitter service delivers service status updates, security information and news about IT systems to students and staff at the University of Sheffield

twitter.com/cics

Did you know the Director of CiCS maintains a blog? Typically updated several times a week, Dr Christine Sexton shares her work life with you but is keen to point out that the views expressed are hers alone.

From a Distance - Director's Blog

For a regular supply of news from CiCS including project news, service improvements and security updates keep checking the CiCS news web page.

CiCS News Web Page

The monthly email newsletter from CiCS aims to keep you informed of developments within CiCS, whilst reducing the total number of emails sent. For information about this email list, including how to remove your name, please visit

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