Cause to Pause

In December ACS released a major upgrade to AccessACS. If you are unfamiliar with this product, it is their online member offering. There are many features beyond member records such as small group managment, volunteer management, event management, etc. The online giving portion alone is worth the price of admission in terms of staff time.
With this new release came an integration with their web based calendar, Facility Scheduler. Facility Scheduler runs in a thin client platform, is very “Outlook-ish” and is generally an all around user friendly offering. If you have both products, Facility Scheduler publishes to AccessACS instantaneously. AccessACS creates a hyperlink which you can display on your website. All around integration is great.
Now for the cool part. Either someone didn’t tell me this or I wasn’t listening (possible) or I just didn’t grasp it (probable). BUT, in the event description portion of Fac. Sched. you can embed HTML code that will then display properly on your AccessACS calendar!

Here is a view of the monthly calendar as clicked from our home page. If you click on a link to one of the events, you can see the description area.
By embedding a little HTML in the description as shown here:

You get a link as shown in the event titled “Foundation” scheduled for January 21.

The same can also be done with an image hosted externally. I even took the HTML code from a Godtube video and dropped in the description.

What this does is open a world of possibilities of crosslinking and display. Clicking on a calendar event and just getting the nuts and bolts of it is ok, but to be able to place images, etc. into it certainly makes it more appealing. Going on the theory that only staff and maybe a few volunteers will actually have the thin client, the display of code in, and access to, the description portion is not of much concern to me.

This is all very similar to how things are displayed through the Event Registration Set-up, but to be able to embed them into FS and have it carry from there seems like taking it all one step further. You can have much more control of an event display. I didn’t try to change the way the font displayed in the description portion, but I wouldn’t see why you couldn’t.

Nice job ACS. I’ll try to drink .

Related posts:

1. Facility Scheduler Update-Separate Links
2. Facility Scheduler Calendar Links
3. Put that calendar in an iFrame
4. Official Press Release
5. Membership data meets Outlook