Implementation Guide - Determine the scope of your implementation
Before you begin implementing Trumba® Connect, it's crucial to get a handle on the scope of your implementation. By scope we mean size and complexity.
The process of determining scope helps you understand:
- What kind of account structure you'll need.
- Which Trumba Connect features you'll want to implement.
Scope-related questions
The best way to determine scope is to answer a series of questions about your organization, events, and requirements. Click each question below to learn more about the implications of your answers.
Your organization
- How many people will be involved in adding and maintaining events?
- Will different departments or groups maintain and publish their own events?
- Do you want to maintain a central account configuration that you can copy to other accounts?
- Will you be implementing Trumba Connect without access to a web developer or designer?
Your events
- Will you import events into Trumba Connect from an existing event data file?
- Approximately how many events does your organization expect to promote each month?
- Do the events you want to promote fall into several different categories?
- Will you solicit event submissions from site visitors? How many user-generated events do you expect to receive each month?
- Do you promote recurring events with highly unusual recurrence patterns?
Your requirements
- Do you require in-depth customization to ensure that your website calendars, calendar email messages, event actions pages, and other calendar-related information reflects your brand?
- Do you intend to reverse publish your event information?
Implications
How many people will be involved in adding and maintaining events?
The number of people involved in adding and editing events determines the number of Trumba Connect accounts you need.
You need to purchase a separate Trumba Connect account for each person who will be adding or editing event information. You can control which calendars each account owner can access and what functions that owner can perform. For example, you can give an account owner a permission level that allows that owner to add and edit events on a specific calendar but not change any of the calendar's settings or publish the calendar to the web
If you expect to have a large number of accounts and the people assigned to those accounts may change, you might want to set up a administrator account. The administrator has permission to control the other accounts associated with an organization- and can change email addresses associated with the account, change passwords, and more.
Administer your organization's Trumba accounts
Will different departments or groups maintain and publish their own events?
If your organization is large and consists of a number of departmental or branch locations, you may want to implement Trumba Connect across all or some of these branches.
Before you proceed with your implementation, it's important to make some decisions up front:
- Will editors in the branch locations maintain their own events? If so, who will train them?
- Do you want to centralize some settings (for example, event types and custom fields or the appearance of published calendars) and then deploy them consistently across all branch locations?
- How many accounts will you need and how will you handle employee turnover?
- Do you want to centralize billing for all of your accounts under one account?
To learn more, see Multiple-site Implementations or talk with your Client Services representative
Do you want to maintain a central account configuration that you can copy to other accounts?
In Trumba Connect, you can set up and customize calendar and account settings in one central account and then share these settings securely across other accounts.
For example, you can share:
- Custom appearance and behavior settings for your main, promotion, and control spuds.
- Event types and custom fields.
- Events created centrally for republishing in departmental or branch calendars.
To learn more, see Multiple-site Implementations or talk with your Client Services representative.
Will you be implementing Trumba Connect without access to a web developer or designer?
As long as someone in your organization is comfortable copying pre-generated snippets of JavaScript™ code and pasting them into HTML pages on your website, the basic Trumba Connect implementation process doesn't require a web developer or designer. You can choose one of our default color schemes, paste the spud code into your web pages, and you're ready to go.
However, if you have custom requirements, it may be difficult to get up and running without developer and designer participation.
We recommend that you consult a web developer and/or designer if:
- You want to customize the appearance of your website calendars and other spuds so they blend seamlessly into your website and match your brand.
- No one in your organization can paste code into your existing website or work with HTML code to arrange elements on the page.
- You want to reverse publish your event inforation for use in print.
Will you import events into Trumba Connect from an existing event data file?
If your event information is stored in data files that Trumba Connect can read, the quickest way to get events onto to your calendars for the first time is to import the files. As long as you prepare your Trumba calendars first, you can even import custom field information.
Note that if you add new events to a data file and then import the entire file a second time, you'll see duplicates of the events you previously imported.
If you're importing a large number of events, it might be worthwhile to talk with your Client Services representative before you import.
Import events from other calendar programs
Retain custom field information in calendars you import from other programs
Do the events you want to promote fall into different categories?
Before you set up the calendars in your Trumba Connect account, it's a good idea to give some thought to how you want to group them. Typically, you create a separate calendar for each distinct group or category of events. Ideally, these categories reflect the way that your site visitors look for events.
Organizing events onto calendars by category also gives you the most flexibility when it comes to publishing or emailing combinations of events that are targeted at specific audiences.
Please tell me more about event categories.
Will you solicit event submissions from site visitors? How many user-generated events do you expect to receive each month?
If you intend to solicit event submissions from site visitors, you can purchase a customized Trumba event submission form that works in connection with your calendars. You can customize the content of the form and you can decide whether or not you want to approve all submissions before they go live.
To learn more about purchasing an event submission form, contact Sales.
Get an event submission form for your website
Do you require in-depth customization?
Through its Publishing Control Panel, Trumba Connect provides you with a very detailed level of control over the appearance and behavior of your main, promotion, and control spuds, calendar and event email messages, event submission forms, and event actions pages.
If you have web developers and designers on-site, you may be able to handle a lot of the customization on your own.
How the spud code works and how to customize it
Customize styles for calendar and event email
Set up an event submission form for a calendar publication
Do you intend to reverse publish your event information?
Trumba Connect allows you to generate a customized RSS 2.0 syndication feed for any calendar that you create. This makes it possible for you to use the event data you store in Trumba Connect as the single source for both online and print publications.
For example, you can publish calendars on your website and in the newsletter than you produce in Microsoft® Office Word. Or, you can include a local events calendar in the online version of your newspaper and provide audience-specific listings in your print version.
To learn more about reverse publishing Trumba event data, read the white paper Reverse Publishing Online Event Information.