Confluence Calendar - Indicating a special event in an event type

[Anshuman Atre]

Hi,

I am using the Confluence Calendar to host our Environment Calendar. Now we have multiple test environments - so I've created a separate Event Type - in a different colour to depict activities in each test environment.

However some activities like OUTAGES need to stand out from other activities for that environment - like functional testing, or PEN testing. The way I am doing that now is including the word "OUTAGE" in the Title field for a new entry.

Is there a way to change colour of a field (like highlight it in a different colour, or change font colour of title)? I would like to highlight all events to depict an OUTAGE (or any other event), so that it stands out.

Can this be taken up as an enhancement, if that feature isn't there?

Thanks!

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Anshuman Atre Welcome to the Atlassian Community.

You have indicated that you know how to create custom Event Types. Have you considered creating an Outage Event Type with the icon and color you desire. If you need to tie it to the environment in your combined calendar, you could add the environment name to the title of the event.

[Anshuman Atre]

Hi Barbara,

Thanks for your response. But that's what I am doing right now, but in a different sense. I just use the word OUTAGE and keep the colour to match the environment. This works for me in the sense that in a month view if there are many outages - they would end up looking all the same unless someone opened an event - to understand what environment this OUTAGE was in. Like if I have a deployment that spans across 9 environments, 9 red events would be time consuming to understand. The current way, folks can distinguish between the environments in the month view. Consider if I wanted to add another special event like "PEN testing". So now you have another coloured set of events - and we don't know what environment each belonged to. Another special event would be batch jobs. And so on.

What I wanted as an enhancement was like a marker (like a coloured dot or coloured font or a stripe) that can be shown to identify a "special" instance of an event type. Not wordings like I am doing right now. This way the base colour (event type => environment) indicated what environment the event is for - and the other colour quickly indicated that it was a special event for that environment - hence an impact.

Visual cues are faster than words - if that makes sense?

Cheers!

Anshu

[Barbara Szczesniak]

I'm not sure if it's possible with calendars in Cloud, but we did something like this in an on-premise version at my previous company:

• Make a separate calendar for each environment with the events for that environment. (for us, it was different applications with different dev teams)
• Make another calendar that combines all the environment calendars. In this calendar, users could turn environments on and off to show only those they are interested in at the time. 

[Anshuman Atre]

Hi Barbara,

Thanks! That could work - just that I'm looking for tons of manual work moving the events across! But then this brings to my question - will this composite calendar be shareable? Like will a URL be available to use for the enterprise to click and see the composite calendar?

Or will they have to add individual calendars to their calendars? If that is the case, this solution won't work. Too much work for me to communicate to the entire organisation and getting this to work. I tried it out, it seems the URL will let them see the composite one.

But then an outage event in 9 calendars will have to be in separate colour in each so that when they get merged, they appear distinct from one another. Might as well create 9 event types in the initial calendar that I have? With the limited hues that are there, its definitely going to look noisy.

Is there a way my problem statement can be used to trigger an enhancement possibly?

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Anshuman Atre I don't have Premium, so I don't have access to the calendars feature. Maybe someone else will chime in with additional information or inspiration.