Tutorial: Connecting to other Calendar Programs

Please note that the features described on this page are only available to subscribers

SuperSaaS offers different ways to connect to other programs:

1. You can use the free/busy information in a Google calendar to indicate your availability in SuperSaaS
2. You can publish a SuperSaaS schedule for display in a calendar program such as Outlook or Google Calendar
3. If you need more advanced synchronization capabilities and are a programmer then there is an Application Programming Interface available. See the API documentation for more information.

1. Set Availability of a Schedule from Google Calendar

When you link a Google Calendar to a SuperSaaS schedule then events in your Google calendar will show up as unavailable periods in your SuperSaaS calendar. One example of where this is useful is if you have a personal agenda and want to let customers book only on times when you are not busy. You can set general opening hours on a schedule and customers will be limited to those times that fall both in between opening hours and are also available in your personal calendar. Note that only the free/busy information is synchronized, so your customers will not see any of the details from your personal agenda. If you want to put an appointment in your Google calendar that you don't want to show up as unavailable time in SuperSaaS you can click "Edit event details" in Google and select the option "Show me as: Available". Another way this feature can be useful is if you have very complex opening hours that can be defined more easily with the flexible Google Calendar options than with SuperSaaS' built in facilities.

These are the steps needed to set up synchronization:

1. Ensure that the free/busy information of your Google calendar is publicly accessible. In Google Calendar find the settings to "Share this calendar" and select "Make this calendar public" and optionally select "Share only my free/busy information". If the calendar your are syncing with is itself a calendar that Google is getting from elsewhere then sharing can only be set up when you add the calendar. In that case you may need to add and remove the calendar to change the sharing option.
2. Ensure the time zone is set correctly, both in Google Calendar and in SuperSaaS. Time zones do not have to be the same on both calendars, but times will be translated as appropriate if time zones are different, so you should make sure that such a translation happens intentional.
3. Find out the calendar ID for the calendar you want to synchronize. In Google Calendar click "Settings" below the calendar name to go to the "Calendar Settings" page. Next click on the calendar name to go to the details screen. The ID is listed near the bottom of the page in the section "Calendar Address" (see picture). If this is your main calendar then it is usually identical to your Google user ID, but if you are using a secondary calendar it is a long address that looks something like "teuappgh9sdojl@group.calendar.google.com".
4. On the SuperSaaS site, go to the "Supervise" screen, "Synchronization" tab, and fill out the calendar ID in the provided box. If you want to still be able to make appointments yourself during the time the Google calendar indicates a busy time then check the box "Allow the administrator to ignore time constraints". The software will verify the connection when you click "Save changes", if there are no errors then the link was successful.

Once this is set up the SuperSaaS system will regularly check your Google Calendar for updates. The frequency with which the availability information from Google calendar is updated depends on how often your schedule is accessed. Whenever someone uses your schedule the system evaluates whether our copy of your information is older than 15 minutes, and if it is it will tell another server to update our copy. This update process can take a few seconds so it can take a second page refresh to actually see the updated information. This should not be a problem for users since they always use more than one page before they can make a booking. But if you are checking your schedule yourself and already have the window open then you may need to navigate around for a few pages to see the update. At the moment up to 6 months into the future of your Google Calendar are retrieved so if that is a limitation you may want to ensure your users cannot book longer in advance.

At the moment a SuperSaaS schedule can only sync with one Google calendar at a time, but one Google calendar can sync with multiple SuperSaaS schedules. This feature currently works only with Google Calendar and with Google Apps calendars, Outlook or other calendar programs are not yet supported. However most other calendar programs such as Outlook or Lotus Notes offer a sync to Google Calendar so you can get the same result via a detour.

2. Publish a Schedule to Another Calendar Program

You can publish your schedule to any program that can subscribe to a industry standard (RFC 2445) iCal feed, such as Microsoft Outlook 2007, Apple's iCal or Google calendar. The iCal link is one way: If you change something online in your SuperSaaS schedule it will be reflected in (for example) your Outlook agenda after it has synchronized. But the appointments cannot be edited in Outlook. You can also use the webcal link to show your bookings on the calendar of your PDA, such as the iPhone, but typically the mobile version of our website (m.supersaas.com) is a better choice because then you can edit appointments too.

To set up a subscription first find out the "webcal" link to your schedule: Go to the "Supervise" screen and then click the "Synchronize" tab and follow the instruction on that page. Next, you can use this link in your calendar program. The procedure depends on the program you are using, see the documentation of that application for details. If you are using Google Calendar then you would need to click the down arrow next to "Other Calendars" in the bottom left corner and then choose "Add by URL". Note that the frequency with which Google updates the information is not under our control and can take several hours. Updates to Microsoft Outlook should take about 15 minutes when default settings are used.

On a subscribed calendar the data is kept separate from the other appointments on your calendar, it is not actually merged, so you can easily delete it again without changing your other appointments. If you do want to merge the appointments from your SuperSaaS calendar with those of your calendar program then you can download them from the "Download" tab and upload them into your schedule program. However in that case the appointments can no longer be automatically updated. A middle ground is to have the SuperSaaS system automatically send you an e-mail with a small "iCal" attachement each time an appointment gets made, that you can then add to your calendar. See the documentation here to find out how to add iCal attachments to e-mail messages.

The frequency with which the data is updated depends on the program (not on SuperSaaS). The standard protocol is very inefficient, requiring transfer of all the data in the calendar on each update, so often calendar programs tend not to update very frequently. Also, the iCal protocol only allows a for a limited number of data fields to be sent across. That means none of the custom fields you have defined in SuperSaaS will be transferred. If you are a programmer you can avoid these limitations by using the SuperSaaS API. This is more efficient and provides all relevant data fields but it requires the technical proficiency to build an interface.

The iCal interface does not provide authorization measures, so if you are concerned people might find out your webcal link and use it without your knowledge then you can block it. On the "Access" tab, near the bottom of the screen you can select "Block access with calendar programs".

Back to Tutorial index