Boundary Conditions

This is a little out of my normal area here, but I received this question in my email and I figured I’d answer it here for everyone’s future reference. Maybe I’ll become the next “Ask Dave“?

On Sep 9, 2008, at 9:05 AM, nadine wrote:
Dear Ray,

I do hope you don’t mind my email you… I am desperate!!!

I work for a gentleman who in turn works for 6 different companies. Because his calendar entries need to be colour coded I have obviously set up a calendar representing each different company which shows a different colour. This works fine between he and I.

However, he would like to share his calendar with a number of colleagues. Do I firstly have to ask each of his colleagues to open a Google account and then do I send an invite to them? However, I think this invites them only to his one calendar and not to all the associated company calendars?

If you are able to advise, I’d be most grateful. I have trawled the net for approx three hours without success.

Thanks,
Nadine

Hi Nadine,

It depends on what you mean by share.

If your employer wants to share 6 different calendars with another person, and that person will have access to add and delete events, or add other persons to those who can view those calendars, he will need to send 6 separate invitations to that person.

If he wants to do exactly the same for a number of other people, then he still only has to send 6 invitations, but include all of the other people.

There are a couple of easier alternatives, though, if the others don’t need to make changes to the company calendars.

You can see one example at my blog, http://67central.com/bc/calendar/. On that page I have displayed 5 different calendars, that anyone can see. These are embedded calendars using the Google Calendar Embed tool to present 5 calendars, all in different colors on a single web page. If you have your own web server or web page, you could add code to a page and your employers colleagues could view it. They could also add the events to their personal calendars.

One small fly in the ointment of that approach is that the content will be visible to anyone which may be a concern, depending on what is on the calendar.

Finally, you can just send the colleagues the private urls for the 6 calendars. On the settings page of each Google calendar, there are 3 links for the “Private Address.” These are links to the XML, HTML, and iCal formatted versions of the calendar. If you send the colleagues the 6 HMTL private links for each color coded company, then the colleagues can view the calendars in their web browser. If you send them the XML links they will be able to subscribe to those calendars in Google and finally if you send them the iCal links, the colleagues will be able to add those calendars to many different types of calendaring software.

I hope that helps,

Ray