Albert

Creating and managing meetings in Google Apps Calendar

(revised 2/24/10)

This document will cover how to create a meeting (or other event), add participants, and set permissions and visibility.

Creating your meeting

To create a meeting, go to the Google Apps calendar by logging in to Google Apps and clicking Calendar.  Then,

1. Find the day that you want to create the event.  Using the Week view is the easiest.
2. Click on the time on that date that you want the meeting to begin.  For example, if the meeting is scheduled for Friday, June 26 at 10:30 am, click the box that corresponds to 10:30 on that date.  If you don’t get it exactly right, you’ll have a chance to change it later.
   

3. You will then see the pop-up for the meeting as shown above.  Enter the title of the meeting in the What: box.  Select the Calendar where you want to add your event, usually your default calendar with the same name as your user ID.
4. At this point, you can click the Create event button to create the meeting or click “edit event details” to change the time, set a repeat, add participants, set permissions, etc.  If you click Create event, you can get back into the meeting later to update that information.
5. In the meeting details screen, set the begin and end time for your meeting, add a location, and enter a description, if desired.
6. When you are finished updating your meeting information, click the Save button at the top of the screen.

Setting up repeating events

If your event is daily, weekly, or otherwise repeats, you can set that in your Google calendar as follows:

1. If you’re not already on the meeting details screen, click the name of the meeting on the calendar to access that screen.
2. From the meeting details screen, look for the Repeats: option under the begin and end time.  Click the drop-down box to set the type of repetition that you want, as shown at right.
   
   
3. Once you set the repetition, you will have other options that you can set, such as every how many weeks, what day of the week, etc.  See below.
4. One important option is the end date for your event.  By default, there is no end date; the event goes on forever.  To set an end date, see below.
   1. Click in the Until circle.  This causes a calendar to pop up.
   2. Navigate to find the end date (end of the semester, for example,) and click on it.  You can modify this later.

5. Click Save when finished, or you can continue to set other options.

Adding participants

The biggest benefit to using Google Apps calendaring is that it can enroll, notify/invite, and track participants for your meetings.  To do so, go to the event details screen, and click on the “Add Guests” link at the upper right.  Add your participants’ e-mail addresses, separated by commas.  They need not be Carthage addresses, but if they are, you do need the whole e-mail address, including carthage.edu.  You can add more participants later, if needed.  As you type, auto-complete will suggest names, just as it does in Google e-mail.

Once you are done adding your guests, check or uncheck the appropriate boxes below the list.  For example, you may not want the guests you specify to be able to invite others to your meeting.

After you have added guests, you can see which ones should be able to attend your event based on their Google calendars.  To do this, click the “Check guest and resource availability” link just above the Where (location) box near the middle of the screen.  A pop-up will show the calendars for that date and time for the various participants in your meeting.  A solid bar will mean that the person is unavailable.  You can then scroll through the days and times to find a more suitable time for your meeting.  There is also a the link to “Find next available time.”  Click OK when finished viewing this information.

When finished, click Save or continue to change other options.  When you click Save after adding participants, you will be asked if you want to e-mail to the participants to notify them of the event.  If you click Yes, each participant will get an invitation to your meeting.  When they accept, the event will be added to their Google calendar.  No matter how they respond, their response (or lack thereof) will be tracked in your Google event.  An example is shown at the right.

You can also correspond with your participants later to send reminders, and so on.  To do this,

1. Click the E-mail guest link shown at right.  The screen shown below will then pop up.

2. Choose if you want to send the e-mail to those who said Yes, No, Maybe, or didn’t respond, by checking the corresponding boxes.
   
3. Enter the Subject and contents of your message in the appropriate spaces.
   
4. Click the Send button to send your message.

Setting permissions and visibility

You can control who can see or modify your entire calendar as well as specific events.  We encourage all Carthage users to make their calendars “public” so that other people scheduling meetings can see if they are busy or not.  You can set the privacy of your entire calendar as follows:

1. Click the small “Settings” link below the list of your calendars at the far left. 
2. The Calendar Settings screen will appear.  Most likely, you will only have one calendar listed.  To the right of its name, there is a link that may say “Shared: Edit Settings”  Click that link.
3. The calendar sharing screen shown below will be displayed.

4. Check the box labeled Share this calendar with others
5. Unless you want EVERYONE in the world to be able to view your calendar, uncheck “Make this calendar public.”
6. Check “Share this calendar with everyone in the domain Carthage”
7. Next to that option, in the drop-down box, select the option that you prefer.  We recommend “See only free/busy (hide details)” so that people can see that you are unavailable but not necessarily know the details of the items that occupy your time.  (They can’t tell a vacation day from a day-long meeting.)
8. Below that, if appropriate, you can designate specific individuals to be able to see event details.  This might be useful to designate your supervisor or a colleague or family member.  Some people may want to designate another person (such as their administrative assistant) to be able to make changes to their calendar.
9. When finished editing these settings, click Save.

Besides the general privacy settings for your calendar, you can also set the privacy for a specific event or meeting.

Google describes these privacy settings as shown below:

Default
Select this option if you want the event's privacy setting to mimic the calendar's privacy setting. If your calendar is private, for example, all of the events scheduled are private by default. The same concept applies to public calendars. The following two options allow you to control the visibility of specific events on public, private, and shared calendars.

Private
For public or shared calendars, select this option to make sure only you and other calendar owners (those with 'Make changes to events' privileges and higher) can see the event and its details.

Public
This option will make the event's details available to those with free/busy access to your calendar. If you're sharing your calendar's free/busy information with a specific person or with the world, this setting will enable them to view all of the details for the specific event. Selecting this option won't make the event's details available in public search indexes.