Shared Calendars vs Apwide Golive for Test Environment Scheduling

We all rely on Outlook or Google shared calendars to keep our schedules on track. They’re excellent for the basics, and even managing some aspects of release schedules. But if you’ve tried to handle the full scope of release management with these tools, you’ve likely noticed their limitations.

In this article, we’ll explore where shared calendars fit in and when it might be time to consider alternatives, such as Golive, better suited for deployment and environment management demands.

Where Shared Calendars Work Best

Shared Calendars are a practical solution for basic scheduling tasks, such as:

These calendars work well for smaller teams managing meetings, holidays, and deadlines. However, they quickly become restrictive when real-time collaboration and coordination across multiple teams and environments are required.

For example, if you're managing a release using a Shared Calendar, you'd need to manually create and track events for each step - scheduling release dates, assigning tasks, updating events for changes or delays, and manually checking environment availability to avoid conflicts. This manual approach is inefficient, especially in fast-moving projects where updates need to happen in real-time.

Shared Calendars fall short when:

Shared Calendars are easy to use but are not equipped to handle the demands of complex IT environments

Golive: A Centralized Alternative for IT Environment Management in Jira

Golive was designed to help release managers manage deployments and IT environments directly within Jira. It centralizes processes, automating much of the manual tracking required with shared calendars, ensuring greater accuracy and consistency across teams. Golive provides real-time release data, visibility across multiple environments, and integrates effectively with the tools development teams use, making it an ideal solution for coordinating releases without switching between tools.

With its powerful environment scheduling features, teams can create environment bookings, manage changes, and handle blackouts - each represented as Jira tickets with dedicated, customizable workflows. Automated conflict detection prevents release delays caused by scheduling issues, and the auto-booking of dependencies ensures teams reserve the full set of IT components needed for their activities.

At any time, teams can access a clear, real-time view of environment usage through interactive Jira dashboards, allowing them to track progress and adapt quickly to changes.

Moving Forward: Why Golive Can Replace Shared Calendars

Apwide Golive provides a unique enterprise solution for release managers to track and schedule their IT environments. Let’s explore a few examples where Golive overcome shared calendars:

Multiple Views and Environment Grouping

• Shared Calendars: Shared calendars offer only a single-dimensional view based on the calendar title. This limitation makes it hard to manage different environments for various stakeholders or group environments in meaningful ways, leading to cluttered and inefficient tracking.

• Golive App: Golive provides multiple views through its timeline feature, allowing users to define different sets of environments tailored to specific stakeholders. Environments can also be grouped and nested by Applications or Categories, using a swimlane setup, making it easier to organize and visualize complex environments.

Booking Workflow

• Shared Calendars: Shared calendars lack built-in workflows, meaning there’s no way to enforce an approval process for events. You must rely on strict user policies and manually control who can create events. There’s also no ability to track approvals or keep audit logs within the same tool, making it harder to manage accountability and ensure proper oversight.

• Golive App: Golive solves this with a customizable booking workflow, allowing events like environment bookings and changes to follow a defined approval process. This ensures that only approved events are scheduled and automatically keeps audit logs within Jira, providing transparency and accountability for every action taken.

Automated Conflict Detection

• Shared Calendars: Without a workflow, shared calendars do not offer automated conflict detection. This means teams have to manually check for scheduling conflicts, which can lead to mistakes, delays, and wasted time.

• Golive App: Golive includes automated conflict detection, instantly rejecting conflicting booking requests. This feature saves teams time by eliminating the need for manual checks, ensuring smoother scheduling and preventing delays caused by overlapping bookings.

Sharing Plans through Jira Dashboards

• Shared Calendars: Shared calendars provide limited ways to share plans, and the information is often static, requiring manual updates. They don't integrate with deployment or observability tools, meaning stakeholders don’t have a real-time, unified view of the data. Exporting information is also limited and not flexible for various formats.

• Golive App: Golive allows you to create unlimited Jira dashboards tailored to different stakeholders, all based on the same real-time data from integrations with deployment and observability tools. You can visualize this information using Golive Gadgets in Jira dashboards or export it in multiple formats like Excel, CSV, JSON, or iCal, ensuring flexible and up-to-date reporting.

Real-time Environment Statuses

• Shared Calendars: Tracking real-time environment statuses is difficult in shared calendars. Teams must manually update and check the availability of environments, which can lead to outdated information and scheduling conflicts, making coordination across multiple environments challenging.

• Golive App: Golive overcomes this with its Matrix View, providing a real-time overview of all IT environments. Teams can instantly see which environments are in use or available, improving coordination and preventing scheduling conflicts.

Conclusion

Shared Calendars can manage basic scheduling tasks but often struggle with the complexities of IT environment management. Without real-time updates, conflict detection, or workflow integration, teams are left relying on manual processes, which can result in inefficiencies and errors, particularly when coordinating across multiple teams and environments.

Golive offers a comprehensive solution that integrates environment tracking, scheduling, and workflow automation directly in Jira. Release managers gain the tools to manage projects more effectively with real-time visibility, automated conflict detection, and better control over dependencies. This approach improves the accuracy and efficiency of release management, helping teams remain aligned and adaptable to changes.