| February 17, 2015 |
Download as PDF (288 KB) |
Read a summary of goals, approach, and results
“Our departmental staff and event planning staff are very happy with our new event calendars. We just launched our new Trumba calendar system this summer; already we have five times more departments using our main event calendars than before and fall semester hasn’t even started yet.” – Gregory Koester, Technology Manager, UW Information Technology
Statement of problem
University of Washington (UW) is a multi-campus university with 16 colleges and schools as well as a world-class academic medical center. Before implementing Trumba, UW lacked a centralized event management system. Departments across the university used a variety of calendaring programs to promote their events. Lack of coordination resulted in conflicting and inaccurate event information and confusion on the part of the university’s constituencies.
UW wanted an event management system that could be controlled centrally and yet give individual departments the ability to create and promote their own events. UW also wanted a system that would integrate seamlessly with the university’s Shibboleth identify management and authentication system.
Centralization with variability
One of Trumba’s most powerful characteristics is the way it supports centralized control over styling, calendar creation, event templates, and custom fields while simultaneously allowing for calendar-level variations. It achieves this balance by supporting a flexible account type hierarchy and sharing permissions framework. This makes it easy for multiple people to keep calendars up to date and promote the same events on more than one calendar without worrying about conflicts or inconsistencies.
The UW’s Trumba implementation includes over 500 calendars across three UW campus locations. "We particularly like the way Trumba makes it easy to share calendars and event information with a simple interface," said Gregory Koester, Technology Manager, UW Information Technology (IT).
UW IT created a standard event template with custom fields that meet the needs of the majority of departments. This results in a consistent look and feel across all published calendars. Where necessary, departments can customize their calendars with styling variations and unique custom fields.
The UW Seattle, Bothell and Tacoma campuses each publish a main campus calendar. Campus calendar administrators share the main calendars with departmental editors who want to promote departmental events more widely. Administrators can tailor each editor’s permissions individually. They can also set up workflows that allow some editors to add events directly to the main calendars while other editors initially post events to an internal calendar where they must be approved before they go live.
Full brand integration
UW leveraged Trumba’s deep customization tools to fully integrate calendars into its website.
Using Trumba’s control and promotion widgets, UW extended its customization to site visitors’ experiences as well. Visitors can switch calendar views, navigate to a specific date, search by keyword, and filter by one or more of 12 UW-defined event types.
Single sign-on
Trumba offers a Single Sign-On (SSO) feature based on the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML 2.0) XML standard. Trumba, as a service provider, communicates with UW’s SAML 2.0 identity provider, which controls the information used to authenticate and authorize users. This interface with the UW Shibboleth installation means that UW staff can sign in to Trumba using their UW Net IDs, eliminating the need for calendar editors to use multiple login IDs and passwords.
Trumba Corporation is a sponsored partner member of the InCommon® Federation. Trumba's SAML metadata is automatically propagated to the identity provider software of other InCommon participants.
More about the Single Sign-On feature
Summary
About UW
- Campus calendar
- Multi-campus university
- Educates more than 54,000 students annually
- 16 colleges and schools
- World-class academic medical center
- More than 500 calendars across three campus locations
Goals
- Centralize account management and template and field creation
- Give departmental editors control over their own calendars with varying permission levels
- Allow departmental editors to publish events on the main calendars with variable approval-based workflows
- Integrate seamlessly with UW’s Shibboleth identity management installation
- Provide a more interactive event environment for UW site visitors, including the ability to post events to social media accounts
Approach
- Trumba Client Services worked closely with UW IT to establish the ideal structure of calendars, templates, and custom fields that would support a site-wide implementation and satisfy the majority of departmental needs
- Set up IT administrators who could add editor accounts as needed
- Trumba Client Services trained the IT team and the first wave of editors and then recorded online training to support additional editors added by IT over time
- Implemented Trumba calendars in phases, beginning with the Seattle campus main calendar and a few departments, and then reaching out more broadly (the first phase took approximately two months)
- Defined a troubleshooting support hierarchy and identified a single point of contact who would take questions to Trumba Client Services
Results
- UW now has more than 500 calendars across three campus locations
- UW staff sign in to Trumba using their NET IDs, eliminating the need for separate login IDs and passwords
- Within weeks of the initial implementation, five times more departments were publishing events on the main calendar than had in the past
- Since implementation, what started as 100 editor accounts has grown to more than 1700
- Active UW Trumba user community that meets quarterly
- Approximately 75,000 calendar views per month
- Site visitors can add events to their personal calendars, set up email and text message reminders, be notified if events change, post events to their social media accounts, and more