Day 11: Using calendar groups

Calendar groups is another new feature in Lights-Out 2.0. In this blog post we will give you an introduction into this new feature. Calendar groups depend on your license, have a look at the feature matrix to find out how many groups are supported in each edition.

Calendar groups are used for two purposes:

• Group elements visually in calendar
• Apply a schedule to all member of a user defined group

Visual grouping

The new calendar in Lights-Out 2 supports a grouped view. Click on “Toggle groups” in the command pane to switch between the standard and the grouped view:

In grouped view, you see two calendars side by side. If you have more than two groups, use the horizontal scroll bar to see other groups.

Lights-Out supports two predefined groups for visual grouping: “Server” and “All computers”. These predefined groups are available in each edition. The “Server” group contains all schedules for the server, whereas the “All computers” group contains all individual schedules for your computers and devices.

Creating additional calendar groups

Click on “Add/Edit calendar groups” to open the group editor. You see the two predefined groups.

Click “New” to create a new group. Call it “Workshop”.

Click “OK”, the group list does now contain 3 groups:

Click “OK” to close the group editor. The calendar does now show a new empty calendar for the workshop group.

Using calendar groups

Creating schedules for a calendar group is done in the same way as before, click on “Add new item to calendar” or double click in the new calendar group. Verify that you do now create a schedule for the group, in our example “Workshop”, instead of a single device.

Now that we have a schedule for our workshop computers, we need to do one last step and assign individual computers or devices to that group. This is done in the device properties.

 

Assigning computers to a calendar group

Double click on the computer or device in the computers or network devices tab to open the properties.

Open the group list at the bottom and assign the computer to the “Workshop” group. Click “OK” to close the properties window. The group assignment is also displayed in the list. There is a “calendar group” column. You can see we have added vw10pro to the “Workshop” group.

Any schedule created for the “Workshop” group is now applied to all members of the “Workshop” group. You can still add individual schedules for single computers to combine both group schedules and computer schedules.

If you made it this far, we will again show a less known feature:

Dragging schedules between groups

You can use the mouse to drag a schedule from one calendar group into the other. A schedule is automatically assigned to a group if you drop it on the “Server” group or any user defined group like our “Workshop” example.

Except for this is the group “All computers”. If you drop a schedule on the “All computers” group which is only used for visual grouping, this assignment is lost. As a consequence the schedule is displayed with a dark red left border. This indicates a schedule without assignment. In our sample below we drag the “Workshop” schedule to the “All computers” group.

Double click on this schedule. Reassign the schedule to an existing computer.

Summary

In this blog post we introduced you to calendar groups. You learned how to create a group and how to assign members. Finally we explained drag’n drop between calendar groups. Tomorrow we close the calendar topic by importing old calendar data from media applications.

Here you will find the complete list of all days of our step-by-step series.