Group Events to General Outlook Calendar Pipeline Setup

Modified on Tue, 19 Aug at 6:57 AM

This pipeline will allow you to push events from your SIS to a Outlook calendar that you can then share with various audiences, as needed. You may create multiple flows with events from several event types. For example, you may want a Middle School calendar that includes not only Middle School events but also All School events as well as holidays and days off. Keep in mind that events are ONLY written to the general calendar and not added to individual user calendars.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Calendar Setup

First the calendar has to exist somewhere in Outlook, typically your SchoolCal user owns them as we do not have access via the API to the school's public folder. To create the calendar, click "Add Calendar" then "Create Blank Calendar" give it a name and then at the bottom choose "Add to Other Calendars" When you are ready to deploy this calendar, from the Settings gear at the top of the page, you will click the "Shared Calendars" tab, then in the lower section you will "Publish a Calendar" and set the level of permissions and click "Publish". This will produce either an HTML link or and ICS link for you to share with your community.

Next, navigate to SchoolCal to the Group Events to General Outlook Calendar Pipeline and click "Create New Flow" as follows:

Filters

There are a series of filters that you may use to sift your calendar down to the desired events:

Date Range

"Only future dates" will only look at dates that occur in the future - past dates will not be considered

"Start and end (inclusive)" will look between and including two dates for events

"All dates (not recommended)" might only be used when deleting a flow so that you include all events

"From today to cutoff date" will sync events until a future date

We recommend using either "Only future" or "From today to cutoff date"

Be sure to save your settings for each section if you make changes.

Group Event Types

SchoolCal will pull your event types or categories from your SIS. You may choose as few or as many as you wish for your calendar, again, clicking save after making your selections.

Group Event Visibility

All events will pull anything regardless of whether they are marked as public. Public events will only pull events that have been flagged as public and Private events will pull events that have NOT been marked as Public.

Group Event Status

Here you may opt to include or not include events based upon their status in your SIS. Note options here may vary based upon your SIS.

Exclude Events

You may exclude events - for Veracross schools you may wish to exclude series master events when individual occurrences have been created.

Include Mapped Resources

If you have purchased resource mapping, you may opt to have any resources (rooms) that have been added to an event create a reservation in that Outlook resource. This will only create the reservation for mapped resources. If you are creating multiple calendars be careful that you are not creating multiple resource reservations (for example if you include all school events on both the Middle and Upper School calendars and there is an All School event that is reserving the gym, you would potentially be creating a reservation from both flows. One option to avoid this would be to create a calendar (and flow) in your SchoolCal user that you are not sharing out but rather it is the only flow that includes all event categories and includes mapped resources.

For Veracross Schools

There are a few additional settings available for Veracross schools:

School Levels

If you consistently select the school level for your events, you may filter by them:

This is separate from the Group Event type above so it is possible to have an Upper School Event that has been left at the default School Level Classification of "All School". If you choose to limit by this we recommend choosing both All School and a division level.

You also may filter a calendar by groups included. (See screenshot below). SchoolCal will pull your groups and display them for you to choose from.

Finally, there is an option to filter by campuses and student groups. SchoolCal will pull your school's settings.

Template Settings

The template settings controls how the event looks on the calendar. You will see a list of your events on the right any fields on the right may be included in your template. Note in this instance the visibility does not really apply as the event is being added to a general calendar rather than an individual's calendar. We recommend leaving this set to "Public".

Veracross schools: of note for this pipeline, location may be either in the location field (text) but often is in the Resource field. This syntax will cover both possibilities:

Location, if input otherwise, internal resource:

"Room 260" or "Room 260" (depending on how the location was entered)