- September 25, 2020
-
Valiant Technology - 4 min
GSuite applications are especially good for ease of collaboration, which is a major tenet of the modern workplace. However, it is important that users understand how to use the tool provided such as Team Drives, Google Meet and Shared Calendars. This article covers the steps to sharing your calendar with one or more users and how to set permissions to grant access only to what you want to allow.
Locate the sharing settings
The basics of sharing a calendar can be simple. First, go to your list of calendars to the left. Hover over the calendar you want to share to reveal the dot dot dot options menu icon. Click that icon and then go to settings and sharing. This will open up your many sharing options.
What are the calendar access permissions
This will all depend on what the calendar is for. Let’s start at the “Access permissions” section.
Here you can choose to make the calendar public. This is really only for a calendar you don’t care who has viewer access to like a public events calendar. If it’s a private or company calendar, chances are you should not make it public. If you’re not sure, err on the side of keeping it private.
If you have a Google business account there is a third option to share your calendar with the entire organization. This will make the calendar available to anyone in your company who searches for your calendar. If you choose this option, you can also decide if you want to show event details or only show what times you are busy.
This section also has a way to create a link to share your calendar. If this is a public calendar, anyone with the link will be able to access your calendar. If you kept it private, sending the link will not grant anyone access unless you have shared individually with them first. We’ll go over how to do that in the next section
How to share with specific people
The next section is under the heading “share with specific people”. Anyone you have shared your private calendar with will appear on this list. If you haven’t shared with anyone, you will see only your username/email on this list.
Click the add people button to invite someone to view and/or collaborate with you on this calendar.
Enter their email address or if they are one of your contacts, including users in your company, you can just type the name. This will bring up possible contacts to share with. You can either click on the correct name or type out the full email.
Don’t hit send right away!
First, you’ll want to review and potentially edit the permissions you are granting.
Google Calendar permissions options
When adding someone new, the permissions will default to allowing them to see all your calendar events including details. This is the most informative, and is great for things like showing your coworkers what you have on the docket for the week.
However, if you want to keep the exact details private, you can click the drop down and change to “see only free/busy”.
For allowing delegate access to your calendar, select the option for “make changes to events”. This will allow the user to add/remove events as well as change some of the details such as time or location if needed.
Want a more collaborative Google calendar? Choose make changes and manage sharing. This will allow anyone you invite to do all of the above, but will also grant them the ability to invite others to the calendar. This also means they can delete the whole calendar so keep that in mind when using this share level.
Flexible calendar permissions
You can easily revoke access to one of your calendars or you want to add more access for an individual. On the same calendar share setting page, under “Share with specific people” each contact will have a drop down next to their name. Click to see and change the permission settings available for that person.
There are a lot of ways you can make Google Calendar enhance collaboration for you and your office. Use this feature and others to make your GSuite experience more convenient and efficient.
Subscribe to Valiant's Monthly Email Digest
Valiant's monthly email digest is filled with original content written by our staff, tech news, and business insights.
