CalendarAnything Availability calendars show the availability of users and other resources. Users maintain their availability by updating their own templates. However, they don’t necessarily update their templates with ad hoc personal events that they track in their Google and Outlook calendars This presents the potential for personal appointments to show up as free time on Availability calendars. With a few steps, CalendarAnything can be configured to omit time slots from Availability calendars for dates and times booked on users’ shared Google and Outlook calendars.

This article shows the step-by-step setup process summarized in the diagram below.

Configuration steps

Step 1: Admin

1. On the CalendarAnything sidebar, right-click the name of the Availability calendar.
2. Select Edit from the context menu. The Create and Edit wizard opens.
3. Navigate to the Availability Template Objects step.
   
4. Take note of the object selected in the Resource Object field.
5. Add a new custom field to the object selected as the Resource Object. (Most likely this will be the User object or a custom object.) The custom field must be of type Text Area, or optionally, Long Text Area if using version 1.125 or higher. The purpose of this field is to hold one or more .ics URLs of shared Google and Outlook calendars. Multiple URLs must be comma separated.
6. Request .ics links from the Availability calendar users for any Google and Outlook calendars they want factored into availability.

Step 2: Users

Note! Your personal appointment details will not show on the Availability calendar. Time slots associated with those appointments will simply be omitted from your Availability.

1. Publish and set sharing for any Outlook calendar that you want shared with CalendarAnything for Availability scheduling.
   • Sign into Outlook.
   • Click the calendar icon.
   • Click Settings.
     
   • Under the Settings View menu, select Shared Calendars.
   •  Under the Publish a calendar section, select the calendar to publish.
   • From the Select permissions field, select Can view when I’m busy.
   • Click Publish.
     
   • Copy the ICS calendar link and save it to a text file.
2. Publish and set sharing for any Google calendar that you want shared with CalendarAnything for Availability scheduling.
   • • Sign into Google.
     • Access Google calendar by entering google.com/calendar in your browser.
     • Click the calendar icon.
     • Select the appropriate calendar and hover your cursor to the right of the calendar name to see the ellipses.
       
     • Click the ellipses to bring up the context menu.
     • Select Settings and Sharing.
       
     • On the Calendar Settings page, select the Make available to public checkbox.
     • Make sure that See only free/busy (hide details) is selected.
       
     • Copy the .ics link located under Public address in iCal format.
       
3. Send the .ics URL link for each calendar to the administrator. Make sure URLs are clearly separated from one another.

Step 3: Admin

1. For each user who has provided you with one or more .ics links, update the new custom field for that user’s record with the .ics link or links. Separate each link by a comma.
2. Notify users of the name of the new custom field.

Step 4: Users or Admin

Update the Availability calendar as follows:

1. On the CalendarAnything sidebar, right-click the name of the Availability calendar.
2. Select Edit from the context menu. The Create and Edit wizard opens.
3. Navigate to the Resource step.
   
4. Select the name of the newly created custom field from the Resource External ICS Field.
5. Click Save.