Carl Hutzler's Blog

I was trying to set-up some shared calendars using Google Calendar on a client’s domain yesterday. The client’s domain is hosted using Google Apps “Standard Edition”.

Anyway, I had previously set-up some calendars for them as an experiment but we never used it because a year or two ago, the ability to sync the calendar to an iPhone and Mac desktop was iffy. Fast forward to now and we were going to try it again.

The issue I found was that I could not get the calendars set-up the way I wanted. I wanted a WORK calendar on each employee’s google calendar. And I also wanted a PERSONAL calendar. I set these up and then went to share the calendars.

I wanted to share the WORK calendar with everyone in the domain so that everyone could see what everyone else was doing. But the PERSONAL one, I wanted to share within the domain but only let other employees see whether someone was free or busy (not what they were doing). No matter what I tried – removing the old calendars, renaming them, changing sharing privledges to PUBLIC and back to what I really wanted – nothing seemed to give me the configuration I wanted. I was always left with calendars showing more or less than the desired config (e.g., personal calendar would show what someone was doing instead of just busy/free).

I eventually fixed it and learned a couple of things which I thought would be useful to share:

1) Changes to permissions in Google Calendar can take anywhere from 10 seconds to 24 hours to actually take effect! While most changes do take effect quickly, the amount of time is not zero. And permission changes like sharing settings do NOT always take effect when you press the save button. There is a delay.

2) If a user has permission to be a domain ADMINISTRATOR, they will be able to see everyone elses calendars even if the sharing setting on that calendar is set to only allow other people to see free/busy. I do not understand why this is so, but it is noted on a google help page somewhere (or a forum page). Basically if someone has admin rights, they can see every calendar in the system! Not good, but it is the way it is.

3) Once I removed admin privledges from one of the users, I had to wait more than an hour for the change to take effect. I am not sure how long it took, but the priveledge change was complete the next morning. After the change took effect, I was able to share the PERSONAL calendar for other users to the user who was an admin person without that former admin person being able to see exactly what was on everyone’s personal calendar. Now it just shows busy/free.