Method Community

Right now my company has a paper schedule (created weekly, often changed due to various logistic issues, customer/employee availability, weather, etc) with penciled in employee names, customer names, and a very brief description of work. Obviously I'm trying to find the best way to replace this paper schedule with Method's Field Services module.

We use Google Apps extensively (email, contacts, docs, and calendar). Just about everyone in our company carries iphones.

Is there any way to make the Method activity calendars for each user public and accessible via a iCal or HTML link? Perhaps even more ideal would be as work is scheduled/changed, each of my employees will have the info updated on their own company Google calendars (which are accessible on their phones).

Clearly, there are many ways to solve the problem. I'd like to get the community's thoughts on it.

Also, one other question re: calendar activities.

Most of our Work Orders will be assigned to multiple employees. Anyone found a way of doing this in Method right now?

Blake C:

Is there any way to make the Method activity calendars for each user public and accessible via a iCal or HTML link?

Not at the present time - the calendar object is only for use inside Method.  

If you wanted to do something like this you would have to use our API to export the data from Method and translate that into an iCal friendly format.

~C

Blake - while it is not available now, we'll soon be syncing with Google Calendar. This will come out on the next version of Method, later this month.

See here:

http://www.methodintegration.com/method/kb.aspx?folder=methodcrm&article=How-Google-Calendar-sync-works&id=214

Now, I don't know if it's going to solve your problem, as it isn't Method Field Services specific (no work order instructions, no job items, etc.).

Paul

That's good news! It's not exactly what I had in mind, but I may be able to use this new feature in a creative manner to get really close and keep from having to write and maintain something custom.

Thanks again!

I was wondering if the Google calendar will support multiple calendars? I have multiple work crews there they each have only one calendar with there schedule, but I have them all in one screen to be able to assign tasks to each crew. How would that translate with the Google Calendar integration?

Blake C:

Anyone found a way of doing this in Method right now?

Out of the box we don't support this so you would need to customize the solution.  I think this change might be a bit tricky since your assignedto field in the activity table is linked to the users - username field.  Because of that you'll need to customize the new work order screen but I think you're going to run into an issue with the calendar object.  The calendar object can be modified a little but it's looking to one resource field to figure out who activities are assigned to - the assignedto field.  The problem here is that the calendar object won't allow you to adjust the resource options - you can change which field it's looking at but that field will need to be based on a drop down.

To acheive something like this in Method you'd need to put in multiple activities for each job, one activitiy per assignee but then that creates another problem - closing all linked activities when a job finishes.  This is not impossible but would require a clever solution.

Alternatively you could create crews of people then assign to a crew instead of one user.  The problem here is that you would need to build a screen to create those crews.  When filling out a work order you would ideally select a crew or popup a screen to customize the crews.

~C

For those following this thread. The Google Calendar Sync is now available on the September version:

http://www.methodintegration.com/method/kb.aspx?folder=methodcrm&article=How-Google-Calendar-sync-works&id=214

Paul

Not sure why, but I just now saw this reply. Sorry.

Yeah, I knew from the beginning I would have to customize Activity (for Work Order data) and open it up to multiple assignees somehow. Your idea of creating one Work Order for each assignee seems like it could work.

It's ugly and a total hack, but I was thinking of creating a "shadow" Activity for each assignee off of the "master" Activity/Work Order so my schedule maker/operations person will simply assign multiple assignees to the master Work Order, which would behind the scenes create a shadow duplicate work order for each person. Closing or deleting the master work order would call an action to delete the related shadow work orders or simply change their status to match the master.

This may be the best solution here mainly b/c of the new Google Calendar sync features in Method. Because each Activity is assigned to one person, their Method Activity calendar will sync to their Google Calendar which can easily integrate and sync down to their smart phone.

I think I may try implementing this very soon to see if it works.

Cool! Thx

Bump