The Google/Outlook Calendar Dating Game

When my university first moved to Outlook, one of the first things people asked was how they could see events from their personal Google calendar in their MacEwan Outlook calendar. So, we’re going to take a look at a few things:

1. Show your work availability from Outlook to anyone (great for users outside of your domain)
2. Share your Outlook events with details (to share with individuals or your personal Google calendar)
3. View your personal Google calendar in Outlook.

You must use the web client to set this up. Sharing or publishing your calendar allows you to view the information — you can only make changes in the original calendar.

1. Share your availability with everyone

MacEwan Outlook users can use the Scheduling Assistant (https://goo.gl/AtxGQL) to see each other’s availability when booking a time. However, external users can’t do the same unless you publish your calendar. This will not only provide a html page with showing your busy/free times (no details), but a link to have the same information appear in your Google calendar.

To start:

1. Login to http://outlook.com/yourdomain.
2. In the top right, click on the Settings icon (i.e. gear) and go to Calendar - Shared calendars - Calendar publishing (https://goo.gl/A9bXWu).
3. Select the calendar called Calendar (your personal calendar) and select Availability only for permissions. This will not display any details of your schedule.
4. Save

You’ll now have 2 links:

• HTML (generates a web page)
• ICS (used by other calendar apps to subscribe to your schedule)

With the HTML link, users can view your schedule by Day, Week, or Month for any date.

To make this easy to access, add the link to the signature line in your email (you can use a link shortener like http://goo.gl). Here’s my signature:

Trevor Beck

Web Services, MacEwan University

See my availability: https://goo.gl/YKOyGl

2. Sharing the details of your schedule

Sometimes you have people you want to be able share the details of your calendar (e.g. your personal Google account, a colleague, your spouse). As you don’t want to change the sharing on your published page for everyone to see (as above), we will share the calendar with just the individual.

From the Calendar view, select Calendar (i.e. your MacEwan calendar) from the Share menu.

Here you can choose different individuals to to share your calendar with different levels of details. To share with my personal Google account:

1. Enter personal email.
2. Choose Can view titles and locations from the permissions.
3. Click Share.

An email will be sent to that email with a link that will allow the user to subscribe to your schedule. If they pass that link on to someone else, the other users will also see your schedule.

When you receive the email in your Gmail do not click on the Add this calendar button (this will prompt you to login to Outlook). Instead, click on the attached file (don’t download or add to your drive) for a preview of it’s contents. At the bottom you’ll find a link that starts with https and ends with .ics.

Copy the link and go to your Google Calendar. From the Other calendars list on the right, select Add by URL and paste in the link.

Your work calendar, with details, will now appear in Google Calendar under other calendars. You can use the settings to change the name and other preferences.

3. Add your personal Google Calendar to Outlook

Rather than repeat what’s already available, check out this handy tutorial from Microsoft:

https://goo.gl/BVZvuS

Trevor Beck is a tech enthusiast whose training expands everything Mac, Google and is slowly making his way back to Microsoft.

Reminder Messages with Google Calendars

One question that's often asked is about sending calendar event reminders to participants. While Google Calendar doesn't actually do this, you can use the event's notifications to help you out.

When setting up notifications (which only applies to me - they're MY notifications), I create three notifications for important meetings:

1. Notification meeting's starting in 15 minutes
2. Notification meeting's starting 5 hours
3. Notification meeting's starting in two days

The 15 minute notification is for me to get to the meeting; the other two are notices to send reminder messages to the attendees. You can do that in a couple of ways. Using Gmail from your browser, just open the event and right above the guest list you'll see a link to email guests:

The link is also available in Google Calendar:

Once you've clicked on the link, you can quickly send a reminder out:

Using Google Calendar for Time Based To Dos (Reminders)

For me, there are 2 types of ToDos - checklists and reminders. Checklists include things list:

  • books to read
  • movies to see
  • items to pack for a vacation
  • stuff to fix around the house.

Reminders are the things you do at a specific time (like on your way home):

  • pickup milk
  • go to the bank
  • drop off a prescription
  • mail a letter

I like to see these things in my calendar so I can plan around them, but I don't want them to be included in my personal or work calendar. Especially if I'm sharing my calendar with others.

My solution: create a separate calendar called Reminders. When I create a reminder (e.g. pick up milk at 5:30 p.m.) I enter it in my calendar and assign it to Reminders. When the time comes, I'm notified with all the features of a calendar appointment (popup, email, SMS).  Don't worry about the end time of the appointment  — you're only concerned about being notified once it starts.

Meetings - Finding the Right Time

One of the biggest challenges when arranging a meeting is finding a time that works for everyone. Typically you'll send emails back and forth to try and find a time that works for everyone. There's got to be a better way!

Google Calendar

Let's start with the basics. If you're sharing your Google Calendar with another Google Calendar user, you can do a suggested search. However, most of us are often trying to organize meetings with people who we don't share our calendars with. If you want, you can make your calendar available to the public (choosing whether your appointment details are visible or not) and let people subscribe to it. You can also embed your publicly available calendar on a web page or Google Site where anyone can see your availability.

This is a great feature when you want to post your baseball schedule or other activity to a web site. However, the one disadvantage of this method is when you click on an event, it will try to add it to your Google Calendar. If you don't have a Google account, it will prompt you to create one.

Doodle

Doodle (www.doodle.com) is a free web service that asks the question "Which time works best for you?". You start by selecting a number of dates and times for your attendees to choose from. You email a link to them and they select the ones that work best for them. As they make their choices, you can see which date/time is the most popular. When you've chosen your date/time, Doodle can send an email  to the group letting them know or you can add the date to your Google calendar or a Google+ Events page.

Advance feature: if you login with your Google account, you'll be able to see your own schedule when choosing dates (ensures you won't be double booking yourself) and you'll be able to directly add the chosen date as an appointment to your calendar. You'll also be able to look back on any of the polls you've created.

YouCanBook.Me

A great replacement for Google Calendar's Appointment Slots, YouCanBook.Me is a free web service ideal for those who want to schedule certain times for visitors to choose from to book an appointment. Unlike Appointment Slots (which is only available to Google Apps for Education/Business), you don't need to have a Google account.

Logging in with your Google account allows the service to see your Google Calendar. You then select the days/times people can schedule appointments with you. Once you're done, you can either point them to a page created by YouCanBook.Me or you can embed it on your own site. As appointments are booked, they are greyed out.

There are lots of features that come with the basic free version of YouCanBook.Me - you can schedule lunch breaks, set a specific date range to be available (so you don't book during your holidays), customize the form, confirmation message/email, logos, etc.

Upgrading to a paid version allows you to have payments processed through PayPal, send followup emails/sms, remove YouCanBook.Me branding and more.

Look at their demo page and discover some exciting ways you can use the service!

Try the 4 Day View in Google Calendar!

At the beginning of the week, I like to check my calendar and familiarize myself with what's coming up. However, by the time I get to Thursday, my screen real estate is taken up by appointments that have happened in the past (past events have been greyed out):

One of the unique calendar views Google offers is 4 Day. It displays yesterday, today and the following 2 days:

The beauty of this is now I can actually ready my calendar!

So, what's your favourite calendar view?

Easily Schedule Hangouts with Google Calendar

A few months ago +Ronnie Bincer  and I were discussing the pros and cons of organizing Hangouts using Google+ Events versus Google Calendar (check out our results). As much as I like Events tool, I still believe Google Calendar is the easiest way to schedule a regular Hangouts for one simple reason:

Everyone understands how calendars work

Events have some great advantages over an appointment created in Google Calendar, but for something as simple as "let schedule a time to meet" and do it as a Hangout, this is it.

The image below shows a typical appointment window. The important items to note are

1. Add a Google+ hangout. Clicking on this will generate a URL for your hangout and now becomes attached to this appointment
2. Add guests. You can type in contacts from your address book or an email address. The beauty of this is you already have their contact info.
3. World Clock. When creating an appointment, you can see what time it is in other places. This is one of the tools in Gmail Labs (http://goo.gl/5P8c0). You can select a number of different world timezones to be displayed when you create an appointment.

Another important thing to note: when you create an appointment and invite someone, the time is shifted to their time zone. For example, when I invited +Michael Daniels to an appointment I created that started at 1p.m., it showed up in his calendar at 3 p.m. ( 

Question: for the majority of your regular Hangouts, would Google Calendar work for you?