When creating a shared calendar for activities or individuals, there are a few things to take into account. Within Google, there are 3 types of Calendars: Primary Calendars, Secondary Calendars, and Resource Calendars. Determining the purpose of your sharing type will determine which type of calendar best fits your need.
Primary Calendars are referenced by the main User’s Email Address,
eg: stephengale@amplifiedit.com
Many schools have created Service Accounts for their shared calendars. This offers the advantage of being easier to locate than secondary calendars when searching in the calendar interface.
The visibility settings for Primary Calendars is found under Admin Console > Apps > Google Workspace > Calendar > Sharing Settings. Here, you can change the default visibility for individuals within the organization, as well as the maximum visibility for external members.
You can override the default setting by changing the Access Permissions section of the Calendar’s Settings. In the Share Settings for the calendar, you will have the primary user add the secondary user as an individual who can Make changes to events (not Make changes and manage).
The difficulty with secondary calendars comes in ensuring that both users are subscribed to the new calendar. Although a calendar may be made public or visible to all members of the domain, without a link to the calendar or an emailed invitation, secondary calendars are not easily discoverable.
Resource Calendars are Google’s newest calendars and are intended to be used for physical resources such as conference rooms, laptop carts, auditoriums, gyms, etc. The ability to book these calendars is based on a settings found under Admin Console > Apps > Google Workspace > Calendar > General Settings:
As a default setting, Resource Calendars have events that are visible to all users. This means that in order to prevent students from reserving a resource, admins will need to go into the calendar and change the Access Permissions to See only Free/Busy and add the individuals or groups to the Share with specific people list.
Creating Resource Calendars is done from the Resources section of the Calendar settings, or can be done from the Directory sidebar > Buildings and Resources > Manage resources. When a Resource is created, if categories and insights are going to be used, admins will need to define the buildings within the resource management. Otherwise, an undefined category and building can still be used.
Once Resource calendars have been built, their availability can be viewed by clicking on Add a coworker’s calendar and selecting Browse resources. This menu is available for all users, and is where admins go to change the visibility settings for a resource calendar. Once the calendar has been subscribed to, changes to share settings and visibility permissions are made in the same manner as other calendars.
To make a reservation on a Resource calendar, users create the event in their own calendar, and in the box where they would invite guests, choose the tab for Rooms then select the room which they are wanting to reserve.
If you found this useful, you may find Reservations for 25 a useful read. It covers in depth, Google’s update that consolidated the buildings and room management features. Interested in going further? We offer technical support and consulting for getting started and managing your Google Workspace domain.