Introduction

"After registering the Site License using it is simple: create a unique URL for each calendar."

There are many optional settings described below, but if you understand the above sentence you will be a long way towards using the Site License.

The remainder of this page is broken into the following six sections:

  • Planning for the site license
  • Registering the site license
  • Configuring the site license
  • Accessing personal calendars
  • Reporting and maintaining

    • Planning for the Site License

    Before you start allowing visitors to your website to create thier own calendars you should spend some time thinking about the following question: "Where is the calendar data going to be stored?". The amount of disc space each calendar consumes is quite small, however with hundreds of thousands of users this may become an issue.

    Each new calendar requires about 6K of disc space. Each event a user adds to his/her calendar takes up an additional 1K of space. The following table gives estimates of disc space usage for various combinations of numbers of users and events.

     Estimated Disc Space Usage for Site License
     (in MB at the end of one full year with no cleanup)
     

    Number of Events
    Per Month
    Per Calendar
     

    Number of
    Calendars or Users
    0.25
    0.5
    1
    5    		  
       Assumed size of a single event: 1K
       Assumed size of empty calendar: 6K

    Note: The numbers in this table are estimates. We believe that the actual number of events per calendar per month will be small - probably less than .25 per month on average. This is because a lot of people will come once to the calendar and never return.

    We present this information so that you may plan for storing and backing up your end user calendars.

    The disc space usage grows rather large with one million users (8-64 Gigabytes). It has been our experience however that many people will create calendars but never use them. If you expect less than 100,000 users the amount of disc space used should not be an issue.

      Note: If you do have disc space issues you may easily install the software on more than one web server and then direct your users to the different servers depending on some criteria such as thier user id. Note that this also allows you to 'load balance' to make sure the calendar software remains responsive as the number of end user's grows large.

    Registering the Site License

    You may register your site license in exactly the same way you register a regular license. Just ask us for a site license when you call.

    The site license includes additional technical support during your evaluation and configuration so ask for help. Included in the cost of the site license is an initial consultation to help you set up the software, help you figure out how to configure the software and help you to access individual end user calendars from your website.

    Configuring the Site License

    By default you don't have to do any configuration, however there are a number of optional settings you may use to make sure the calendars work as you wish.

    As each new calendar is created a particular file on your server is copied into the calendar's folder. This file is called ./cgi-bin/calweb/cw_template/default.tem. Any changes you make to this file are copied into each new calendar as it is created.

    The details of this file are presented in the Configuration File Details page. Pay particular attention to the [SITELICENSE] section of this file. Once the file is copied into the calendar folder it is renamed to calweb.ini.

    Three other files are also copied from the ./cgi-bin/calweb/cw_template folder into the new calendar folder. They are eventedit.dat, todoedit.dat and contactedit.dat. These files are detailed on the associated help files. You need not edit these file but you may if you wish. An example of why you might edit these files is want to use one of more of the user defined event fields such as User Drop 1 or User Text 2.

    Finally, you may wish to use the Template Based Display feature to further customize the end user's calendars.

    Accessing Personal Calendars

    As each new calendar is automatically created it is stored in a seperate subfolder of the data folder (/data/calweb by default). This subfolder is specified by you - the web site designer - using the level= parameter in the URL to the program.

    The level= parameter specifies, almost directly, the location of the calendar data for a given calendar. In the simplest case may use the end user's userid as thier level, thus:

    http://machine_name/cgi-bin/calweb/calweb.cgi?level=JohnDoe

    This will cause the program to create a new calendar in a subfolder under the ./data/calweb folder called cw_johndoe (the cw_ is added for internal reasons to identify this calendar as part of a site license). See the note below about creating a hierarchy in the data folder.

    If the requested calendar already exists it will be displayed. If, however, the requested calendar does not exist a new one will be created. The following things happen when a new calendar is being created:

    Notes:

    • The level= parameter may be any string you choose - it does not have to be the user name (in fact, you may wish to make it something different so that other people find it more difficult to switch between calendars).

    • The level= may contain an arbitrary number of '/'s Each time a '/' is encountered in the level= parameter a new level (thus the name) is created in the hierarchy.

      For example, you might create a calendar called level=Sales and a number of other calendars called level=Sales/Person1, level=Sales/Person2, etc. In this way you could create multi-leveled merged calendars more easily by merging in the Sales calendar into each personal calendar.

    • The calname= parameter works in conjunction with the level= parameter to allow you to better hide the exact location of the calendar on the hard drive.

      For example, you could encrypt or scramble the level= parameter so as to make it harder to switch between calendars but use the calname= parameter to keep a user readable calendar name.

    • More information about configuring the site license is here.

    Reporting and Maintaining

    If you access the calendar program with no parameters (as you would normally have done before registering) you will be presented with the Site License Administration Login screen.

    Log in using the userid you received when you registered to access the Site License Administration screen.