Slate External iCal Integrations
  • 04 Apr 2024
  • 3 minute read
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Slate External iCal Integrations

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Article summary

Slate allows users to add external iCal feeds into Slate Events and Scheduler. Users can easily add institutional calendars, staff calendars and more, directly into Slate including any free/busy information.

🔔 Important!

When adding a web calendar, it will be added to both the Events and Scheduler calendars; these cannot be separated.

Your institution's policies might prohibit sharing Outlook Calendar Feeds. If you do not see the option to Publish a calendar in Outlook, your institution's IT department may need to enable external calendar sharing before you can sync your iCal feeds into Slate Events and Scheduler. You can read more about Outlook calendar sharing on support.microsoft.com.

The US Holiday iCal is automatically available in Slate.

Adding Events to an Individual Google Calendar

  1. Click Events or Scheduler in the top navigation bar.

  2. Navigate to the iCal subscribe section on the lower right-hand side.

  3. Right-click either All Events or Your Events ('Your Events' refers to events associated with a specific user).

  4. Select Copy link address.

  5. Log in to your Google Calendar application.

  6. On the left-side menu choose Add a calendar and select From URL.

  7. Paste the URL you copied in step four into the pop-up window.

  8. Click Add Calendar.


  9. Your Slate calendar will now be available on the left-side menu.

Slate caches the iCal feed locally once per hour with Events and roughly three minutes for Scheduler, all of the latest updates in preparation for the external service (i.e. Google) to come and pick up the iCal feed. In other words, Slate does not push the update to Google – Google has to pull the update from Slate.

Adding an Individual Google Calendar to the Slate Calendar

  1. Go to the individual Google Calendar.

  2. Select Options > Settings and Sharing

  3. Within the Integrate calendar section you can choose to copy one of these two different links

    • Public address in iCal format - Copy this link if your Google calendar is publicly visible

    • Secret address in iCal format - Copy this link if your Google calendar is NOT publicly visible

  4. Right click on one of these links and select Copy. 

  5. Click Calendars located in the lower right section and add the calendar.

  6. Provide a name to the newly added calendar.

  7. Select Save.

  8. Click "Your Feeds" in the Calendars section located in the lower right section and select the newly added calendar. 

  9. The calendar will now display under 'Calendars'. Select/unselect non-Slate calendars to display or not display respectively.

Tip

It is current best practice to explicitly set the time zone for an event in the Details tab instead of using the "Autodetect from Location" setting to ensure the correct time is presented in iCal.

Adding Events to an Individual Outlook Calendar

This process will add Events in Slate as a new calendar in Outlook. After following these steps, the Slate iCal file will automatically sync and be available to view on an individual's computer.

🍎 Note for Mac Users:

Outlook can import events and to-do items from iCal.

  1. Click Events or Scheduler in the top navigation bar.

  2. In the iCal subscribe section on the lower right-hand side, select All Events or Your Events ('Your Events' refers to events associated with a specific user).

  3. In the pop-up box that appears, click Open Pick an app or Open Outlook.

  4. If the pop-up box opens, Pick an app and select Outlook.

  5. When Outlook opens, it will display a pop-up window. Click Yes in the pop-up window to add the events to your calendar.

Adding an Individual Outlook Calendar to the Slate Calendar (Web Browser)

This process will add an individual's Outlook Calendar to the Slate calendar feeds.

  1. Log into the individual Outlook 365 calendar using the web browser version.

  2. Select Settings > View all Outlook settings.

  3. Select Shared calendars.

  4. Under Publish a calendar, choose the calendar to be published and configure any other settings as necessary.

  5. Select Publish and copy the ICS link.

  6. In Slate, Click Manage Calendar Feeds, located in the lower right section of the Events module, or Calendar Feeds from the Database.

  7. Click "New Calendar Feed"

  8. Paste the ICS link and provide a name to the newly added calendar.

  9. Select Save.

  10. Click "Your Feeds" in the Calendars section located in the lower right section and select the newly added calendar.

  11. Toggle Share as free/busy calendar.

  12. Select Save.

  13. The calendar will now display under 'Calendars'. Select/unselect non-Slate calendars to display or not display, respectively.

Tip

It is currently best practice to explicitly set the time zone for an event in the Details tab instead of using the "Autodetect from Location" setting to ensure the correct time is presented in iCal.


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