THANK YOU!!! This was driving me nuts. I have 16 calendars and 50 volunteers trying to rescue sea turtles but I could not seem to get the scheduling calendar to work until I read your tutorial… We just switched to google apps this season. You are helping us rescue thousands of sea turtle hatchlings!

Justin Gould Sea Turtle Oversight Protection

This has me so pissed of it’s not even funny. I’ve got a client with 10 Calendars.

Trying to migrate them has been a nightmare.

I NEED Google Apps to allow me to automatically have the calendars show up for all users automatically.

Google’s own documentation even says you should include the link to all group calendars in a “training document.” This is just terrible. (http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1626902)

I’m very frustrated right now.

I don’t understand the point of using Google Apps at all if this is the way it’s going to work…

I completely understand your frustration. The problem with Google Apps (for Business) is that there just aren’t enough tools to help you manage a large organisation. Google’s ethos is to empower every user to look after themselves but most people (especially) in large organisations just aren’t like that. They just don’t have the time to be clicking on emails; they’re too busy fixing fighter planes on the front line! The problem and consequently the solution is with Googles API nature. Google provides a huge number of APIs and it’s churning out products as fast as it can but it means that each product has to do the minimum. Google expects the gaps to be filled in by the Google Marketplace.

I had a quick look at Google Marketplace and Promevo gPanel for Google Apps Administration looks like it will do everything you want and more.

I agree with @Jason & @Ellis that this is ridiculous. Two and a half years later and Google still hasn’t fixed this and they still have the same misleading message that says, “Share this calendar with everyone in your company” and it still doesn’t do the thing everyone assumes it will do.

Just goes to show you how poorly Google products are managed and run. Features that work are great but good luck getting anyone at Google to change something that clearly doesn’t. Falls on deaf ears and empty inboxes.

Thanks for your post here David. Very helpful, though super painful to do every time we onboard a new employee. Google, are you listening?

There is a much BETTER and easier way to do this.

In addition to the steps above, create a group with all the users you want (or in my case all the users in our entire org).

Then on the sharing options of the calendar add that GROUP with write permissions. Everyone gets an email automatically with a link to the calendar and everyone by default has the permissions you set for the group.

Finally, with Andrews help and a little digging, I got the shared calendar with the ability to edit for all members.

A group for the organization needs to be created with all members of the organization accepting an invitation to be in the group.

The administrator of the group needs to create the calendar in My Calendars, and in the sharing section “Share with specific people", enter the email address for the group. This is generally going to be if the form of the groupname at the domain name. Before you proceed, change the permissions to allow anyone in the group to do whatever you want them to be able to do to the calendar.

The individual members of the organization will automatically receive an email inviting them to create the calendar. It will be created in the Other Calendars section, but will be able to be selected as an editable calendar if they want to edit or create events.

Not really much to it, but this sure is a confusing task to find information on.

Yes, Andrew’s group method is the easiest way to get everyone access to a calendar all at once. Google’s stupid “Share this calendar with everyone in the organization” checkbox had me convinced I was doing something wrong for months!

HOWEVER, adding a NEW member to the group does NOT automatically give them access to the calendar - they still have to be given the link somehow.

In order to pull this off, you’re creating an ‘extra’ calendar on your account and sharing it with the company. What happens when you leave and your account is deactivated?

A) If the account goes away, how do you migrate this en masse all the events on a given calendar to a new vict- er, admin?

or, B) How do you create a group calendar this is user account independent without creating a dummy account that is a security problem waiting to happen?

The owner of a calendar may be changed. You add specific users to access the calendar and give them full rights. That user then changes the calendar settings to remove the original owner’s rights to the calendar. The calendar is transferred. Alternatively you can just export the calendar as iCal and import it into another account.

When someone leaves a company there is a formal process to handle it which may include revoking access to a number of other systems, door key entry, etc. You could just solve this with an extra step to reassign any calendars or in fact any Google Docs they might have to other people.

Typically you’d put all the shared calendars under the administrators account. This is the first email address used to create the Google account and, as far as I know, can’t be deleted.

Regarding creating extra accounts, the administrator can create an account which is impossible to login to. The administrator can then assign different users different levels of access to the various Apps available on that account.

I know one company that has 40,000 people in its Google Apps for Business account and it takes a small army to run it. There’s lots of administrator tools you can buy/licence from the Marketplace to help with these kinds of housekeeping jobs.

When you scale up like that you can afford your own developers and get them writing tools to help the business run it. The Google API is comprehensive; what you see in the admin pages is just a fraction of what functions are available.