After you have purchased the Calendar Sync add-on, you need to grant us access to write events to your calendar and update them as they are changed in the system.
This is a multi-step process which can be complicated for certain calendars. Each calendar system has different requirements to enable their authorizations. Overall, the process is similar to setting up calendars on your mobile device.
Here's a video which goes through these steps for Google-provided calendars. If you would like to know why these steps are necessary simply to link your calendar, there is some explanation after the video.
You may find the process a little easier if you sign into your calendar in the browser first. calendar.google.com
Why go through all these steps?
You may have previously set up a calendar sync simply by adding a link to your calendar. Some other platforms provide this. We used to as well.
Those links are pretty easy to use. But they need to be added for each squad whose events you want. In addition, they sometimes need to be added to each device you use.
However, they also have several important shortcomings.
Mainly, they have no security or privacy. Once someone has a link, they have access to the schedule, regardless of whether they are still on the team or have access to the calendar on the website or app. This doesn't matter most of the time, but the times it does matter, it matters a lot.
Our feeling is that if you need to sign in to see the events in our system, we shouldn't be pushing them to a calendar link with no authentication.
That in turn forces organizations to choose between:
- Making everything publicly viewable so it can sync
- Sync part of the schedule (like sync games but not practices).
Even when the event itself may be publicly viewable, there are certain elements only available to people on the squads. This means we can't publish the full event details to a mechanism with no security.
The alternative to the old, insecure method is to build something like our current solution. We write events only to the authorized calendars of the people who can currently access the events online. However, that requires you to also grant us access to do so. Your calendar provider correctly does not want anyone to simply be able to do this. So, for this more secure (and we believe ultimately more convenient) solution, there are a few extra one-time steps in the beginning.