Enterprise Calendars are an important part of the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution. It is important to establish and agree upon a plan for Enterprise Calendars in your organization before you create them in the Enterprise Global Template. Enterprise Calendars are the primary scheduling mechanism used to determine working time for all projects, tasks, and resources. Project Server 2003 includes four types of calendars:

• Base   A base calendar is used for two purposes, either directly as a task or project calendar or as a template for resource calendars. The Standard Enterprise Calendar is the only base calendar type that is included in the Enterprise Global Template by default. The Standard Enterprise Calendar is the default calendar for projects and resources; it is based on a traditional Monday-Friday, 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. work schedule with a single hour break in the middle.
• Project   A project calendar is the base calendar used to designate the default work schedule for all tasks in a project.
• Resource   A resource calendar is used to reflect specific working hours, vacations, leaves of absence, and planned personal time for individual resources. A resource calendar can be based on any base calendar, but the default is the Standard Enterprise Calendar. Individual resource calendars for enterprise resources are stored with other resource information in the Enterprise Resource Pool.
• Task   A task calendar is useful for situations in which you want to schedule a task outside of the normal working times defined by a project calendar or resource calendar. You can select any base calendar to be a task calendar.

 Note   Like other items in the Enterprise Global Template, Enterprise Calendars were introduced to the EPM Solution in the Microsoft Project Server 2002 release to provide a way to enforce consistency across all projects. Any user who has permission to check out the Enterprise Global Template can define and maintain Enterprise Calendars. In addition, the Project Server administrator has the ability to disable local calendars (enforce Enterprise Calendars) across all projects. All Enterprise Calendars are stored in the Enterprise Global Template; every time a user starts using Microsoft Office Project Professional 2003 and connects to the computer running Project Server 2003 or Microsoft Project Server 2002, the latest Enterprise Calendars are cached on the local computer as part of the cached Enterprise Global Template. This enables a user to use Enterprise Calendars when working on a project in offline mode.

When deciding what type of Enterprise Calendars your organization requires, you must consider whether to allow or disallow local base calendars. If you disallow local base calendars, you will need to create Enterprise Calendars in the Enterprise Global Template. Disallowing local calendars restricts how project managers work in your organization by restricting the use of task calendars or non-default project calendars. Typically, project managers define project and task calendars as needed. Project managers do not typically have permission to add or make changes to Enterprise Calendars that are stored in the Enterprise Global Template. You might need to use local base calendars if you need to use task calendars and if you have local resources that need to be assigned to a non-Enterprise Calendar.

If you decide to use Enterprise Calendars, you must decide what types of calendars your organization needs. You can create many types of custom Enterprise Calendars in the Enterprise Global Template, including:

• Company calendar   A calendar that is specific to your organization's calendar year.
• Country-specific calendars   Calendars that identify local working weeks and working holidays.
• 24-hour calendar   Calendars that are used for projects that require continuous work, occasional shift-related work, or otherwise require tracking work for the entire day, not just a standard working day.
• Shift calendars   Calendars that specify normal, predictable shifts.

You can add Enterprise Calendars to the Enterprise Global Template in the following ways:

• By using the Organizer to copy a calendar from an existing project into the Enterprise Global Template. Using the Organizer is often the quickest and easiest way to move calendars into the Enterprise Global Template.
• By creating them manually, that is, by adding a new base calendar.