[Calendar] Meeting Planner and Firefox

[Patrick P Murphy]

Greetings.

Many of you on this mailing list are the "movers and shakers" for room
reservations, and are probably quite familiar with meeting planner:

   https://mtgp.ad.nrao.edu/

With the recent upgrade to Firefox 45 ESR, one feature no longer works
as it used to: clicking (or clicking and dragging) on a blank spot to
make a new reservation.

We have documented workarounds for this here:

https://info.nrao.edu/computing/collaborative-computing/reservations-system/user-guide

The easiest way is to click on the menu icon at top right (those three
stacked white bars on the navy background) to bring up the "quick
menu", and then click the link for "Create Reservation".

Mac users can of course use Safari (the old way still works there),
and Windows users can use IE (ditto).  

We (CIS) have spent many hours in communication with the vendor, and
they are simply not going to fix this problem.  Their proposed
mitigation is that we upgrade to a much larger package (which of
course costs more, and does things we don't need).  This is the second
time in the Observatories' use of online calendars that a corporate
acquisition has rendered our preferred application obsolete.  WebEvent
was the first.

We are looking for alternative packages, and already have one
(open source) candidate in testing internally.

So, apologies for the inconvenience, but the need to keep Firefox at a
secure, current level was greater than the minor annoyance of the loss
of one feature in MTGP.

If you have questions that are not addressed by this message, or by
the documentation on info.nrao.edu referenced above, feel free to
contact me (or if you prefer, open a CIS support helpdesk ticket at
https://support.nrao.edu/).

 - Pat

-- 
Patrick P. Murphy, Ph.D.               https://www.nrao.edu/~pmurphy/
Info Services Site Manager          NRAO Information Security Officer