How does Get a Room integrate with Google Calendar?
Get a Room allows you to publish your Get a Room schedule to Google Calendar.
You can select the Google Calendar you wish to publish to and the rooms you wish to publish reservations for. You can have multiple calendar/room combinations.
When reservations are created, modified or deleted in Get a Room, those changes will be published to the Google Calendars you have specified. Under normal conditions, reservations are sent to Google Calendar a few seconds after the changes have been made in Get a Room.
However, you cannot make changes to any published reservations in Google Calendar. Any changes made to published events in the selected Google Calendars will be overwritten or deleted by Get a Room, if the original reservation is modified or deleted inside Get a Room.
Conversely, any reservations made in the Google Calendar where reservations are published to will not be synchronized back to Get a Room. The published reservations are effectively read-only - this is similar to Outlook's Internet Calendar Subscription option - which we also support.
Public Calendar
Tip: If you are just looking for a simple way to share a read-only view of your Get a Room calendar, then you can use the Public Calendar Address option in Get a Room. This allows you to share a link with users which allows them to view the calendar, but not make any changes. You can also configure their ability to see basic event details.
Why can't the synchronization be both ways?
Get a Room offers a richness of business rules and validations that many of our customers use to manage their space more effectively. Generally, customers adopt Get a Room as their authoritative system for conference room bookings - this gives the best outcome and access to our full feature set.
We want our users to know without any uncertainty that their booking has been made successfully and is valid. The inability to currently provide a clear indication to the user if their reservation is invalid when using Google Calendar (or any other 3rd party calendar system) makes it extremely challenging for us to offer a two-way synchronization. This may change in the future, but at this time we are unable to offer this feature.
Consider some of our business rules:
- Room permissions
- Maximum number of hours per day, week, month
- Amount of credit remaining
- Business hours
- Maximum reservation duration
- Maximum booking window range
- Reservation lock out period
Google Calendar has no awareness of our business rules. Google Calendar would not prevent a user from making a reservation in the calendar at a time that is not available to them - either because the time is already booked by another user or there is a business rule violation.