NCast Telepresenter M4 - Manual (Page 31)

NCast Telepresenter Reference Manual
Google Calendar is a web-based interface used to enter calendar events such as meetings and
appointments. It allows multiple personal calendars (e.g. business and home) and allows sharing of public
and private calendars with friends and associates.
One interesting and important aspect of this calendaring system is that Google has defined a standards-
based software API (called “gdata” for many of their services) which allows programmatic access to the
calendars and the events contained within them. The API is implemented in Java and several other
languages, and allows outside programs (e.g. clock widgets, PDA’s, other calendar systems) to access and
create events within a Google calendar.
NCast has taken advantage of this programmable API to implement a scheduling system for Telepresenters
where the web-based Google Calendar is the administrative interface for defining session start/stop times for
one or more Telepresenters within a customer’s network.
The process works in three steps:
1. An administrator enters one or more scheduled events for a Telepresenter
2. The scheduling process queries the calendar at regular intervals and captures these events.
3. Commands sent to the IP Serial Interface of a Telepresenter starts and stops the unit.
The calendar interface allows an administrator to setup single or repeating events. The example below
shows a single event scheduled for Tuesday, a Monday-Wednesday-Friday repeating event, and a Monday-
to-Friday repeating event. An event is associated with a single Telepresenter listed in the “Where” field. Two
events with the same start/stop times on the same day can be directed to two different Telepresenters simply
by changing the contents of the “Where” field. The “Description” field (discussed below) allows customization
of the actions executed at scheduled start time.
So to get started, and administrator must establish a Google Calendar account (different from a Google mail
account) and provide a password for this account. Multiple accounts can be established for multiple
Telepresenters if that is easier to administer.
Only the primary or default user calendar is processed. The program is not able to deal with secondary
calendars at this time.
NCast Corporation Revision 2.2
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