It’s December. By now your HR department should have published the holidays for next year for your company. But did you add them to your Domino Directory and did you let HR tell people how to add them to their calendars? Shame on you if you didn’t. But it’s not too late. Here is a quick reminder of the steps:

1. Get your list of holidays from HR for each country you have users. Remember, they are different around the world.
2. Open the Domino Directory and go to the view: Configuration – Miscellaneous – Holidays
3. There are already national holidays listed, but leave those alone. Those are the official holidays which may not correspond exactly with the days your company takes off. Instead, create a new set of holidays. When you do this, put them into a group named appropriately, for example “2011 Office Holidays – Canada”. I like to put the year first so it is easier to find in the list.
   
4. If you already have a holiday listed, just edit it and update the dates and change the group. Be careful about repeating the entry for more than one year. Most HR departments don’t finalize the holidays more than 1 year in advance and they don’t always follow a set rule, so talk to your HR department first.
5. Tell your users how to import the new holidays. Repeat this information again in January when everyone is back from their vacations. Some people who have a lot of vacation to burn are already gone for the year and won’t go back to read your message. Ideally, this message would come from HR and would be included where ever they post the holiday list.

You should also ensure new hires are given the instructions on how to import calendar entries. And just in case you forgot how to do that…

1. Open your calendar.
2. In the Action buttons, click on More – Import Holidays.
3. Select the groups of holidays you want imported. Here is where you’ll be glad you put the year first. If you work with users in other countries, you may want to import the holidays for those countries too.

Consider this my holiday gift to you.   Happy Holidays!
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