Automatically adding Calendar Items from one Calendar onto another as blocks to avoid doublebooking?

[KAM]

I have a user who has a calendar at Workspace Instance A and Workspace Instance B.

He wants to avoid double booking when people view his calendar but he can't give any details.

Anyone know of a way or tool that can take calendar entries from one calendar and block them off an another calendar?

-KAM

[bill_pier3]

Can't he just share free/busy without the event/calendar details?

[KAM]

@Former Community Member That solution with free/busy sharing allows the user to see the blocks but it doesn't allow others to see them so he ends up getting double booked.  -KAM

[bill_pier3]

What?  Free/busy indicates to OTHERS that one's calendar is already "booked" at that time.  It works perfectly with the "Find a time" feature in fact.  If the appointment times are fixed then appointment slots could be used. 

[piotr_first]

Hi some time ago I was facing this problem and as a solution I've found :

a) https://caldavsynchronizer.org/ - unfortunately it doesn't work on Mac

b) http://zapier.com/

I haven't tested any of them.

[jason_tech]

It's possible to auto decline incoming invites if they conflict with the busy blocks in the 2 calendars. This article Auto Decline Conflicting Invitation In Google Calendar demonstrates a simplified use case to decline invites that conflict with the user's primary calendar. 

The workflow can be extended to the use case you described. He needs to add the calendar from Workspace Instance A to Workspace Instance B. Register a Foresight with Workspace Instance B. Then create such workflow

1. New calendar event trigger. Watch for both calendars.
2. Check event conflict with these 2 calendars.
3. If so, decline the event with a note. If not, leave it as is. 

This workflow could prevent double-booking. 

[stimms]

I can see two ways of trying to achieve this:

1. A way of working change or;
2. Using API's.

The way of working could be that the user always invites himself at Workspace B to all events created in workspace A and the same instruction given to those who invite him to meetings. Or the user just adds himself at workspace B to any events. Could even create a distribution list that contains both email addresses and instruct users to invite that user to any events so that both calendars are blocked out.

The API way might be achieved by GAMADV-XTD3 but I have not done this before to know whether it works nicely or not:

gam calendar <CalendarEntity> update events attendee <EmailAddress>.

This would need to run on a schedule so would not be live. Depending on the number of events it could run every day, hour or every few minutes.

[MarvinSoriano]

My boss use ClockWise (https://www.getclockwise.com/) which seems to be good for him. 😃

[KAM]

Thanks all for the input.  He's still searching for a solution.  Seems to be pretty edge case.  -KAM