I love Google Apps. Truly the wonder of having all of our groupware (calendar, contacts, email) in the cloud and available from any device without the complexity overhead headaches of hosting our own Exchange server is nothing short of magic. That being said, if you are like me, you’ve struggled grumbled sworn at/about the process of adding an event to your Google Calendar.
That is until recently. I received an email from Google and there it was, a link to Add the Event to Google Calendar… I just had to learn the secret behind this magic trick. Googling it, gives returns a top listing that looks promising. This Google Help page contains a link to “Let people save an individual event from your site”. Perfect.. However, it links to page that redirects to the standard “embed a calendar in a web page” which is of little to no use.
So, let’s take a look at the actual link and see if we can back it out…
https://www.google.com/calendar/render?action=TEMPLATE&text=Next&dates=20150616T180000Z/20150617T003000Z&details=Learn%20from%20our%20team%20of%20experts,%20hear%20customer%20success%20stories%20and%20meet%20innovators%20that%20are%20building%20on%20Google%20Cloud%20Platform.&location=Online%20streaming
The key elements here would be:
- action – use a value of TEMPLATE
- text – the title of your event (remember to URL encode it)
- dates – this indicates the start and finish date/time (in UTC) separated by a /. The datetime should be represented by yyyymmddThhMMssZ where T signifies the transition to time and should be included.
- detail – (not required) contains the URL encoded description of your event
- location – (not required) contains the URL-encoded address to your event (or in this case Online Streaming for a live stream event)
When the user clicks on this link it opens Google Calendar with a new event pre-filled out with the supplied fields. This is perfect as it will show up with your defaults for items like Visibility, availability, Notifications, which calendar to add it to and who to invite.
This is so much easier than saving an .ics file and then importing that into your calendars. Give it a try in your apps and I think you’ll be quite surprised with the results and your Google Calendar-using folks will love you for it.
At Over The Top and Exhibit A Communications, I've programmed solutions for Google as well as at least one other company that was later acquired by Google.
I've been CTO of an Internet SaaS company and spent my time pretty evenly between guiding the future technical strategy of the company, architecting software solutions for my dev teams, designing and running a data center to service our clients world-wide as well as being a technical evangalist/sales engineer to our media clients large and small.
I've also been Chief Photographer of the Daily Sun/Post newspaper back when it was a 5-day a week daily newspaper.
I also spent a great many years as a beach lifeguardfor the City of San Clemente as well as Jr. Lifeguard instructor and then as it's program coordinator.
Bragging rights
Private Pilot with Instrument rating and proud husband of soon to be 25 years (and counting).
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