Total ReCal is aimed most directly at the students, there’s no denying it. However, universities are complex places with more special interest groups than you can shake a stick at. We affectionately refer to these people as “academics”, and this blog post is about how Total ReCal and My Calendar will help them.

One of the main activities of academics is often teaching, be it lectures, seminars or smaller groups. At the moment we have a staff timetable which can be used to see where teaching happens, but My Calendar provides a much smoother interface to the same data. Once we’re sure the basic functionality is in place we can then go a step further, giving the academic access to information such as attendee lists directly from within the application. It’s a small thing, but we think it’s helpful.

Another big thing that we’ve heard time and time again from academics is that they very easily forget to return library books. In an ideal world everybody would jot down due dates in their calendar, but when you’re trying to manage everything else it just isn’t practical. My Calendar will solve this by making book due dates seamlessly available from the same place, automatically taking into account renewals. We’ll even put a ‘renew it now’ button straight in the calendar for the times when you just can’t be bothered walking to the library to return a text.

“But wait,” I hear you cry. “Academics don’t have time to visit yet another website to see things, otherwise these problems wouldn’t exist.” Well, we’ve solved that as well. My Calendar also sports industry-standard iCalendar outputs for everything, making it a breeze to load information straight into the calendaring tool of your choice and keep it updated with zero effort. Almost all smartphones support it, and the vast majority of desktop calendaring applications do as well. We’ll be providing in-depth instructions on how to get yourself synchronised at launch time.