It took me a while to figure out how to set up calendars for a company using Google Apps. Part of the problem was that I had not completely understood how the calendar is created and therefore could not understand the mechanism that allowed the calendar to become visible to employees of that company.

I hope this document helps you to understand how to set up Google Calendars and explains different policies that you might adopt to make the best use of Google Calendars.

I had incorrectly assumed that there would be an administration page that allowed me to create a company wide calendar, once created this calendar would just appear in every employee’s calendar view and all would be good. This however is not the case and it took me a while to realise that this is quite different to other software providers’ calendar applications.

Google works by allowing a user to create a calendar then assigning visibility of it to other people. This is opposite to what I had expected. I had expected the company administrator to create a calender that all members of the company would automatically have access to. Simply put: Google has calender at the centre instead of the company.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing; speaking as a software implementer this is definitely an easier way to manage things, I’m just saying it’s not what I was expecting. In fact now that I have used it this way, I kind of like it better!

I’ll take you through a common scenario to help you understand how this might work. In these examples I will assume that everyone in your company has their account under one Google Primary domain account.

Let’s say that your company is split into 2 administrative companies, for example a head office and a sales office which are geographically separated. People in both companies would like to see each other’s calenders so that they can make appointments and meetings between themselves more easily. For the most part both offices run as individual entities. The head office is not really interested in all the sales meetings and the sales office is not really interested in all the bean-counter meetings.

In this case we will set up 1 separate calendar for each office.

1. Log into the calendar application at: http://calendar.mydomain.com.
2. On the left of the screen in the My calendars section click Add.
3. You will be presented with a form on the Create New Calendar screen. So fill in the name as HQ Office you can choose what ever makes sense to you.
4. Fill in the Description. This is free text so it could be something like “Calendar for all the people at HQ”
5. Fill in the Location to your geographical location. This is free text so it could be London or Floor 6
6. Next there is a space for time zones which will pick up the default that your administrator has set already.

7. Finally we must set the access permissions. There are 4 options:

   1. Not shared: This will be a calendar that only you can see.
   2. Company only: Anyone in the company can see this calender.
   3. Public: Anyone in the world can see this calendar.
   4. Named: Only listed people can see this calendar.

   In this instance we want everyone in our company to see this calendar but no one else. So we will check the Share this calendar with others and Share this calendar with everyone in the organisation My Organisation.

8. Finally click the Create Calendar button.

You will be taken back to the Calendar screen and after half a second your freshly created calendar will appear on the left in the My calendars section.

You should do exactly the same for the sales office calendar. However after the second calendar has been created it has a funny name (not sure why it doesn’t take the Calendar name like it does for the first one - bug probably). Don’t worry this is simple to change.

1. Next to the Add link there is a Settings link, click this.
2. Click the name of the broken calendar which will be something like mydomain_com_random_letters@group.calendar.google.com.
3. Change the Calendar Name back to what it was supposed to be e.g. Sales
4. Click the Save button and everything should look normal.
5. Clicking Back to calendar will take you back to the calendar screen.

Next up is to share this calendar with the rest of the people in the company. This was the bit that confused me as there isn’t an easy way of doing it, you just have to do it the long way.

1. Log into the calendar application at: http://calendar.mydomain.com.
2. In the My calendar section (on the left) click the Settings link.
3. Click the calendar’s name link.
4. At the bottom of the page in the section entitled Calendar Address the Calendar ID is listed. This is the global address of your calendar.
5. Cut and Paste it into an email.
6. Do the same for the other company wide calendars e.g. sales.
7. Email the references to everyone in your company.

Yeh, I know it’s a bit crappy but it’s the only way.

Your employees will receive an email with the 2 global calendar reference addresses in it. They must then add the new calendar mappings to their calendar application.

1. Log into the calendar application at: http://calendar.mydomain.com.
2. On the left-hand side in the section Other calendars cut and paste the calendar reference from the email into the text box and press return.

To get rid of it just click the My calendar -> Settings and then the Unsubscribe link for that calendar.

You will now see 3 calendars in the My calendars section. Yours, HQ’s and sale’s. Clicking each calendar name will change the colour from something to white. White means not selected and there is a different colour for each calendar. As they toggle on and off, the overlay of calendar events that can be seen in the main calendar view changes to include or exclude the events from that calender.

A handy tip is that if you don’t use the other calenders then don’t switch them on because when you create an event it will automatically set the new event to the calendar that is selected.

Some other examples of sharing calendars are:

1. Creating a department wide calender: on the Create New Calendar screen, just include the list of department members in the section Share with specific people when creating the calendar.
2. Creating a public calendar: If you organise events for the public you might want to allow anyone to see your calendar so when creating the calendar set the Share this calendar with others to Make this calendar public.

Creating a public calendar is slightly different in that it doesn’t require the user to have a Google Apps account. It really is completely public. Whereas all the others require you to be logged into your Google Apps account in order to validate that you are on the list of users that this calendar is visible to.

There’s one other thing worth mentioning, which is that you can restrict how much of the calendar a user can see to either the whole sh-bang or just whether you are busy or free (i.e. hide the details).

I think that covers just about everything!