About Calendars

By default, SBM calculates time using a 24-hour/seven-day-week calendar. You can create custom calendars to establish hours of operation, however, and assign them to the following features:

Duration Reports
You can specify a calendar for Duration reports, such as Time in State and Average Time to State reports. This enables you to calculate the amount of time items remain in a particular state or how long it takes items to reach a state based on your organization's hours of operations. For details on using calendars with Duration reports, refer to the SBM User's Guide.
Notification Escalations
You can assign a calendar to notification escalations to ensure that they are generated only during your organization's hours of operation rather than 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This prevents escalations from generating repeatedly over weekends and during holiday breaks, for example. You can assign a custom calendar to each notification escalation, or you can assign custom calendars to user accounts, and then select one of the following options for each notification escalation:
- User Owner
  Performs time calculations based on the calendar set for the current owner of the item being assessed for escalation.
- User Submitter
  Performs time calculations based on the calendar set for the submitter of the item being assessed for escalation.
For details on using calendars with escalations, refer to About Escalations.
Resources
You can create separate calendars and assign them to resources to determine a resource's weekly working hours. This is then used to calculate capacity in Serena Demand Center and to calculate time distributions for the Time Capture feature. Ideally, you should create and use unique calendars for resources to prevent any conflict with other features that may rely on calendars. For details, refer to About Working Hours, Capacity, and Scheduling.

Elapsed time for these features is calculated based on each calendar's defined operating hours. For example, the time to escalate may be set to 8 hours, and a calendar's hours of operation is set at Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. If an event that triggers an escalation to fire begins at 3 p.m. on Friday and the event is not resolved, an escalation is sent at 2 p.m. on the following Monday.

Note: Calculations are not combined for multiple calendars, and you can only apply one calendar to each notification escalation or report.

Using Calendars Across Multiple Time Zones

A time zone is set for each calendar, and this time zone is used for all calculations based on the calendar. Time zones applied in each user's preferences do not automatically apply to hours of operation calculations.

To apply hours of operation across multiple time zones:

Create calendars for specific time zones, and then apply them to individual notification escalations and reports.
Create calendars for specific time zones, and then assign them to users in those time zones.
For notification escalations, select the User Owner or User Submitter calendars to apply them to the time zones set for the calendar assigned to the user who owns or submits an item when it is evaluated for escalation.
Note: Notification escalations that use the User Owner or User Submitter calendars are calculated against an item's current owner or submitter. This user may change during the time-to-escalate period. For example, if a user with a US/Eastern time zone owns an item for two hours, and then assigns the item to a user with a US/Pacific time zone, the escalation is fired based on the user with the US/Pacific time zone.

Calculating Elapsed Time for State Changes

By default, elapsed time for state changes is recorded based on a 24-hour day, seven-day week. A record is added to the database every time a primary item moves from one state to another. These records are used for calculating elapsed time for the Average Time to State duration reports.

Note: If you upgraded your system from Serena TeamTrack and you want to report on elapsed time for state changes on primary items in the database before the upgrade, you should run the PostUpgradeUtil.exe AFTER you upgrade but BEFORE you use the new report types. For details, refer to Moving to Serena^® Business Manager.

You can also create custom calendars to use for duration reports. This allows users to run reports that show elapsed time for state changes based on the hours of operation defined in the calendar. To record elapsed time for state changes based on a calendar, select the Save Elapsed Time for Calculating State Changes in Duration Reports check box located on the calendar's General page.

The following information applies to elapsed time calculations for state changes:

Recording of elapsed time for state changes used by duration reports begins when the Save Elapsed Time... check box is selected for a particular calendar and ends if this check box is cleared. Reports that use calendars with this check box selected only return data for the period when elapsed time for state changes was collected.
Elapsed time for state changes made to primary items outside of a calendar definition are recorded as zero. For example, if a calendar defines hours of operation from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and an item changes state at 7 p.m., the elapsed time for that state change is recorded as zero.
Creating a large number of calendars that record elapsed time for state changes could impact your system's performance.
Elapsed time records for state changes cannot be deleted or archived.
If a calendar that is used by existing reports is deleted, users who execute the reports are notified that the report will no longer reflect time-in-state data.