CentraView Review, Part III

(In Part II I reviewed CentraView's contacts module, which thanks to its ease of use, its large amount of detail, and its smart interactions with other modules I found to be CentraView's strongest feature.)

Last week I said I would review both the calendar and activities modules in one entry, but I decided instead to split it up into two, shorter, easier to digest entries.  I will post the activity module review later this week, where I will write some conclusions about both modules, as their functions are related.

The Calendar

The calendar can be displayed in five different views: daily, two different weekly views, monthly, and yearly.  The daily view displays the day’s schedule from 12:00 AM to 12:00 PM top to bottom divided in ½ hour intervals, as well as a drop-down menu to select one of the world’s time-zones.  The columnar weekly view shows scheduled activities with the days of the week horizontally across the top, and the time of the day split into one hour intervals top to bottom, while the regular weekly view shows activities in seven daily blocks.  The monthly view tries to fit in all of a day’s scheduled activities in little blocks, while the yearly view serves simply as a link to different weeks or days, and does not display any activity information.  On the right side of the daily and weekly views there is a small calendar of the current month with links to the months’ days and weeks, as well as a list of unscheduled tasks below it.  In each view there is an activity search bar, as well as drop down menus that let you select whose activities you want to see and modify (if you have the appropriate permissions) and which type of activities you want the calendar to display (calls, meetings, to-do’s, etc, see next section for more information on each type of activity).

Figure 1: CentraView's calendar, daily view.

Overall, the calendar module is OK, but not great.  Among the positives are the ability to view one’s schedule in five different ways, the drop-down menus at the top of each display, and the overall simplicity and ease of use of the system.  One glance at the daily view gives a quick and effective overview of the day’s activities, which obviously is the main purpose of such a calendar.  Completed activities appear with a line drawn through them, a nice and simple way of quickly showing what has already been done.  The ability for users to give viewing and editing privileges to other users is also a very good idea.

However, I would have liked to see more detail displayed about each scheduled activity.  The calendar suffers from the same short-coming as the home-page, in that it only displays the title of the activity and no other information, unless the user takes the time to hover the mouse over each link.  The user can assign an importance to new activities (high, medium, low) but this level of importance is not displayed on the calendar, even though it would have probably be simple enough to do through colour-coding.  Also, having each hour of the day displayed in the daily view seems to be overkill, I would have preferred a 7am to 7pm calendar with twice the detail and perhaps 15 minute intervals.  The time-zone selection menu also seems unnecessary, and in fact it creates errors and confusion.  When I started playing around with this feature, I found that I began to have trouble having new activities appear at the time I wanted them in the calendar, which was obviously a huge inconvenience and made the calendar nearly useless.

The biggest shortcoming of the calendar is that it allows conflicts in schedule, i.e. two activities scheduled at the same time, without giving a warning.  If the user is scheduling activities right from the calendar page, he or she will see the potential conflict; however if he is using the activities module where the calendar is not displayed, he can too easily schedule multiple activities for the same time-frame.  This becomes even more of a problem when different users have the ability to schedule activities for the same person, an employee and his boss for example.

Part IV will review CentraView's activities module.