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Our Drupal now allows Add to Calendar links.
- Neat: Click on the calendar icon at the end of the date line:
- When prompted, Click open (which will stat your default file association for ICS files, likely MS-Outlook):
- if necessary, add a suitable reminder, and click””save&close”
- Your appointment, with location, will be put in your calendar and come alive when you need the reminder(and where, if you connect your other, home and mobile devices to MS-Exchange):
- But as of yet, not everybody seems to be using this handy facility (I find myself manually copying over info into manually created appointments).
- Unfortunately, this is still only a static ICS file, not a subscription which would be automatically updated in your calendar if the originator/organizer changes the schedule.
To publish an aggregate calendar of MS-Exchange ICS calendar subscriptions, use Google Calendar
If you manage many resources that many users need to share, you will want to give them an intuitive overview of the utilization. We manage room and equipment booking in MS-Exchange 2010, but both Exchange and Outlook/OWA/Office365 are not for everyone (to set up), and seem to lack a convenient way to publish an aggregation of the iCal feeds of the individual resources that can be published.
Enter Google calendar: Start with creating a new calendar which will hold your calendar aggregation, and make it public:
First add ICS-based internet calendar subscriptions to Google calendar:
We have prior ICS feeds arranged in MS-Exchange 2010 which are listed in the LRC calendar spreadsheet:
Open the calendar
Copy the URL form the address bar:
Insert it here:
Replace html at the end by ics.
Check “make calendar publicly accessible”
Access calendar settings
Change calendar name to part before @
You can rename these subscribed calendars, but this name will not carry over to the embedded calendar, see below:
Open the settings for the main calendar:
In the settings section “embed”, Click the “Customize” link to open the “Google Embeddable Calendar helper”:
Select the “Calendars to display”: this list contains the ICS-subscriptions you added earlier.
Unfortunately, the Google’s embeddable Calendar helper seems to “eat” the names you have given these calendars, and replace it by the default “Calendar” (there is no calendar name stored in the ICS, it seems), so you have to maintain a color legend manually (the color is permanently stored in the iframe HTML code snippet).
Also, you users have to manually match the color when they (de)select calendar subscriptions from the main calendar:
Embedding the iframe HTML snippet works in WordPress
Google Calendar embedded aggregated calendar won’t show calendar names?
- When I add "Calendars to Display" in the "Google Embeddable Calendar Helper" ,
- Google calendar lets me select calendars I added from iCal sources,
- but it does not "remember" the names I have given these calendars,
- displaying only the default name "Calendar",
- rendering the aggregation feature useless (Which is which?).
- Is there a workaround or hidden feature like a “name parameter” in the embed query-string? What is it? I cannot find it in the Google Calendar API reference.
ICS corruption in Moodle calendar events?
- I am seeing once again a large number of events loaded as internet calendar into MS-Outlook via an iCal link default to the same day:
- This time the iCal sources is Moodle, but it also displays the iCal feed internally so:
- I observed a similar issue when loading certain Drupal calendars into MS-Outlook, only that
- it seems to have affected only certain sites on the same (?) Drupal instance (is this user input error?)
- Events defaulted to the current day in MS-Outlook – the Moodle issue does not.
- All events were effected – not so in this Moodle issue.