Make Calendars Show Up for Users

[Joel Lowsky]

Hi All,

Per this article, any calendar shared with a group still needs to be manually added by group members in order for it to be seen in their calendar list.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/1084801?hl=en

When you share a calendar with all users in your organization or with a group, users will still have to manually add your calendar to their list of calendars. This is necessary to avoid cluttering the calendar view, as many organizations share all their users' calendars by default.

We know that if you share with users by name the calendar will show up in their list, but, as above, sharing with a group doesn't do anything until the user adds it manually.

Not great.  A new employee arrives, new account created, and they either have to be manually added to all calendars, or added to all groups and then instructed on how to add the calendars themselves.

Any ideas on how to default shared calendars to show up automatically?

Joel

[Marion Bates]

bump...good question!

[Jesse Thorstad]

That is a pain.

We have an intranet page with a table containing buttons for subscribing to the variety of calendars we offer. Screenshot below. It's pretty easy for people to just click the button and "Add to calendar".

Jesse Thorstad
Technology Specialist
Fergus Falls (MN) Public Schools
http://www.isd544.org
218-998-0544  x2036

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[Marion Bates]

That's a really good idea. Thanks!

[Jesse Thorstad]

This is a useful tool for making the buttons:

https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/3033040

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[Matt Maas]

My colleague Glen Stewart shared this little snippet with me that allows a user to insert the calendar's unique id.  You can then email this link and when a user receives it they can click right on the link to add it on their end:

http://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/upperschools.org/render?cid=upperschools.org_u06rcket373m56neg9pi6qo7tg@group.calendar.google.com

The characters in green represent the unique id of a particular calendar. Just replace them as needed!

--MM

Matthew L. Maas
Library Media Specialist
Upper Township Middle School
525 Perry Road
Petersburg, NJ  08270

609.628.3500 x2259

[Matt Maas]

Hit "send" before I was done!  Anyhow, you would also have to change the "cid=" portion of the link template.  And I think that creating calendar buttons is a much easier method.  

--MM

Matthew L. Maas
Library Media Specialist
Upper Township Middle School
525 Perry Road
Petersburg, NJ  08270

609.628.3500 x2259

[Devon Jacobs]

Hi guys... 

I know this is a late post to the topic, but I think I've got another workaround for you...

I've been wrestling the same problem here, and the button solution is a great idea! but sometimes you just can't rely on a new staff member (especially new to google) to figure out what calendars they need, or should have.

you can do it from the admin side with the newer versions of GAM!

let's say you have a faculty calendar that's shared with everyone in the fac...@school.org google group 

you need to add a new faculty member: polly.wan...@school.org

add your new faculty member, and place them in the faculty group (either manually or from GAM which is much faster)

at this point the calendar is technically shared with the new user, but not added to their personal calendars

to force the calendar into her account just issue the GAM command:

gam user 'polly.wan...@school.org' add 'calendar school.org_mn86erp...@group.calendar.google.com'

and it will appear in her calendars with whatever permissions that the faculty group has.

The only trick is that you need to know the address of the calendar (the bit in red). if you already have the calendar in your list you can do a 

gam user youra...@school.org show calendars 

to display the actual address of the calendar you need... 

you get something like:

Name: school.org_mn86erp...@group.calendar.google.com       <<<==== THIS IS THE BIT YOU NEED

  Summary: Faculty Calendar

    Description: 

    Access Level: owner

    Timezone: UTC

    Hidden: False

    Selected: False

    Default Reminders:

Unfortunately, this command only works for individual addresses, so you couldn't do gam user fac...@school.org show calendars to see all the calendars that the group has access to...

You only need to do this once, I just copy and paste them into a spreadsheet alongside the human readable name for later use. I do student and faculty intake in a spreadsheet that uses concatenation to generate a full set of gam commands to add new users. So the entire process is simply a cut and paste into console once I have all the key user info. whole GAM set would look like this:

gam create user 'polly.wannacracker' firstname 'Polly' lastname 'Wannacracker' password 'somerandompassword' org 'faculty'

gam update group 'faculty' add 'member polly.wan...@school.org'

gam user 'polly.wan...@school.org' add calendar 'school.org_mn86erp...@group.calendar.google.com'

I suppose it's not really practical if you normally use the gui to get things done, but if you're already using gam, what's one more command?

-Devon

On Wednesday, January 8, 2014 4:56:13 PM UTC-5, Joel Lowsky wrote:

[Rudy Gruenke]

So unless I am missing something it looks like Google changed something and the tool isn't there any more. Any other suggestions for making these buttons? I really like the page you have Jesse and wanted to replicate for our domain. Having a subscribe button would be so much easier then telling people to copy the URL and add it to the calendar. 

Thanks

Rudy 

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[Brian Gray]

On Wednesday, August 6, 2014 8:36:52 PM UTC-5, Rudy Gruenke wrote:

So unless I am missing something it looks like Google changed something and the tool isn't there any more. Any other suggestions for making these buttons? I really like the page you have Jesse and wanted to replicate for our domain. Having a subscribe button would be so much easier then telling people to copy the URL and add it to the calendar. 

Rudy - 

See my webpage - http://goo.gl/X5Ux0W - for notes on how to build the "Subscribe to calendar" button HTML code.  

To create a button to add a single event to a user's calendar, edit the event and scroll to the bottom of the page.  Click on Publish event.

As Devon Jacobs describes, GAM is a great tool for doing this on a large scale.  See this page on my site - http://goo.gl/wrOfD1 - for streamlined setup instructions.  Once authorized, GAM can add a calendar to all users in an OU or to all users in the domain.