[Calendar] Noon bug in WebEvent

[Alan Bridle]

Noon bug in WebEvent
====================

Dear calendar schedulers,

Shirley Curry has discovered a bug in WebEvent's handling of
the 12:00am/12:00pm "ambiguity" which can complicate diagnosing
event conflicts (i.e. when the program refusing to accept a new
event because it says a room is already scheduled).

Internally, WebEvent uses "12 a.m." for midnight and "12 p.m."
for noon.  A one-hour meeting starting at 10:30 a.m. and ending
at noon must be therefore scheduled from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.  

If that event in fact gets scheduled from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 a.m.
(a common error), WebEvent thinks that it is a 13-and-a-half hour
meeting extending to midnight of the next day.  It will then block
you from scheduling anything else in that room during the afternoon.

That's NOT a "bug", because the meeting really was requested
for 13-and-a-half hours according to the a.m./p.m. convention.

What IS a bug is that WebEvent LISTS such a meeting in the
displayed (or printed) calendars as being scheduled from 10:30 a.m.
to 12:00 p.m. (i.e., to "noon", not to the following "midnight").

The effect of this, as Shirley discovered yesterday evening, is
that you can be blocked from scheduling an event in the
afternoon in a room if there is a morning event in that room
that was entered as ending at "12 a.m." ... but you can't SEE the
conflict in the calendar summary displays.  You can see it
only by bringing up the morning event's data-entry screen (where
the true "12 a.m." entry will be shown and you can then change
it to 12 p.m.)

This is a bug that we will need to report to WebEvent and hope
that they can fix fairly soon.  But until then, if WebEvent ever
refuses to schedule an afternoon event while reporting a conflict
that you can't see from the main calendar display, you may need to
check that any morning event LISTED with a stop time of
12:00 p.m. really was ENTERED that way, not with a stop time
of 12:00 a.m.

Other than this, the recent WebEvent release seems to have fixed
our conflicting-event problems.  (Their web site mentions that this
release fixed a bug in conflict checking involving multiple time
zones ... sounds like us!).  They fixed that bug fairly smartly
after we ran into it, so let's hope they'll be able to clear up this
remaining nuisance just as quickly.

Cheers,

Alan