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Calendar Sync

Updated

Table of contents

Overview

Calendar Sync enhances scheduling in Administrate by integrating instructor and resource calendars, including Microsoft Outlook / Microsoft 365 and Google Calendar. This keeps instructor schedules and room availability up to date with their bookings.

Administrators can view availability in one place, making it easier to plan training sessions, assign instructors, book rooms, and reduce scheduling conflicts.

Purpose

Calendar Sync is used to:

  • Establish a two-way sync between Administrate and external calendars.
  • Keep instructor and resource availability up to date.
  • Help administrators identify conflicts while scheduling Events.
  • Ensure instructors and resource managers have accurate calendar information for training commitments.

Syncing instructor calendars

Calendar Sync allows instructor calendars (Microsoft Outlook / Microsoft 365 and Google Calendar) to connect to Administrate using a secure OAuth process. Once connected, events are synchronized in both directions (Administrate ↔ external calendar).

Inviting instructors to sync their calendars

Administrators with the required permissions can invite instructors to synchronize their calendars. You can track sync status, including connected calendars and pending invitations.

Calendar Integration screen showing instructor invitations and status

  1. Navigate to Control Panel > Calendar Integration.
  2. Select the instructors whose calendars you want to sync.
  3. Click Send to email invitations.
  4. Instructors receive an email inviting them to sync their calendars with Administrate. They should follow the instructions in the email to complete the synchronization process.

Instructor setup and privacy options

After receiving an invitation, instructors connect their calendar using OAuth and choose how their availability is shared.

  1. Private: Only date and time are synchronized. Events appear as “busy” without exposing details.
  2. Default Privacy: Respects the visibility settings of each calendar event (public vs. private).

Instructor OAuth setup and privacy selection screen

The privacy option is chosen once, while connecting. To change it later, remove the instructor's calendar from the Calendar Integration settings, resend the connection email, and ask the instructor to select the required privacy option while reconnecting.

Data synchronization

External calendar → Administrate

  • Event title, shown as “busy” if private mode is enabled
  • RSVP status
  • Dates and times
  • Sync statuses that come over:
  • Free
  • Busy (any "unavailable" statuses fall into this category)
  • Tentative

Administrate → external calendar

When instructors are assigned to active Events, the following details are synced to their calendar:

  • Event title
  • Location and venue
  • Virtual meeting links, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or custom links
  • Description including a link back to the Event, other assigned personnel, local time, and any booked resources

Draft Events are not synced. A session only pushes to instructor and room calendars once its Event is published (moved out of Draft). While an Event stays in Draft, its sessions are excluded from calendar sync — publish the Event to have them appear on connected calendars.

Syncing resource / room calendars

Calendar Sync can also be used to integrate room calendars from Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace with Administrate Resources. This allows room availability to be reflected during scheduling and keeps room bookings synchronized between Administrate and the connected calendar.

Calendar Integration Settings tab showing the Resources connect card with Sign in with Microsoft and Sign in with Google buttons

Calendar Integration screen showing room calendar settings

  1. From the Settings tab, sign in with an account that has the necessary permissions to manage the calendars you want to sync. Choose Sign in with Microsoft or Sign in with Google, depending on where your room calendars live.
  2. Use Add Calendars to integrate your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace room calendars.
  3. Map the room calendars to corresponding Resources within Administrate.
  4. Calendar events are synchronized between the connected calendar (Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace) and Administrate in both directions, helping keep room availability up to date.

Google Workspace requirement: Administrate discovers Google room calendars from your organization's Google Workspace directory. The account you sign in with must be able to grant access to your organization's calendar resources — typically a Google Workspace administrator, or an account a Workspace admin has authorized. It also needs management rights over the room calendars themselves so that bookings can be written back. If the connecting account cannot grant this access, no Google rooms will be available to add.

How room connections work

Room calendar sync is set up per connection, where a connection is the signed-in TMS user together with the Microsoft or Google account they authenticated with. For most organizations the best setup is a single dedicated account that connects all your rooms once, so room availability is shared across all users without depending on any individual's account; see Recommended: use a dedicated account below. The mechanics behind that recommendation:

  • Each room is tied to the connection that added it. Syncing uses that account's access, and the rooms it can offer are the ones that account can see and edit.
  • More than one user can connect. Rooms from all connections on the instance are combined for scheduling, so different users can contribute different rooms. Each user connects one account — Microsoft or Google — at a time, but different users can connect different vendors, so a single instance can combine both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace rooms. The Settings tab shows only the rooms added under your own connection; Super Users can view and manage every connection on the instance through the API.
  • What stops a room syncing: disconnecting the integration for that connection, or the connected account being disabled or losing access to the room. Deactivating the TMS user in Administrate does not stop their rooms syncing, as long as the connected Microsoft or Google account remains active.

Because each room stays bound to the account that added it, connecting rooms through a personal account means room sync depends on that person's Microsoft or Google account remaining active: if they leave the organization and their account is disabled, their rooms stop syncing.

For a durable setup:

  1. Create a dedicated account that isn't tied to an individual person (for example, a shared Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace account) with access to all the room calendars you want to sync. For Google Workspace, this account also needs permission to read your organization's calendar resources from the Workspace directory.
  2. Sign in to the integration with that account and add the rooms from it, so every room is bound to one connection your organization controls.
  3. Manage that account's credentials like any other shared credential, and use the same account when room mappings need to change.

Sync frequency

Real-time sync

When you create or update an active Event, meaning an Event that is not in draft mode, the schedule is instantly synced with the calendars of assigned instructors and resources.

Scheduled sync

Calendar Sync pulls in 12 months of event data every hour from instructor and room calendars into Administrate. The window starts from the current time and looks forward: future calendar entries are synchronized, historical ones are not.

Calendar sync scheduled sync log

Manual sync

You can run a manual sync at any time by selecting the instructor or resource calendars and clicking Sync Calendar.

Manual Sync Calendar button

Availability Calendar, Scheduler, and instructor assignments

You can view instructor and resource external calendar conflicts when scheduling and planning Events throughout the platform.

See Availability Calendar for more information.

Availability Calendar showing synced availability

Assigning instructors on Events

If Calendar Sync is enabled, a calendar icon appears next to the instructor’s name. You can expand the view to check scheduling conflicts in the Event’s local time.

The same applies when assigning resources, where you can see room availability and potential conflicts.

Instructor assignment screen showing calendar sync conflict information

Removing a Calendar Sync

Both administrators and instructors can disconnect a calendar sync. Disconnecting removes events created by the sync from both Administrate and the connected calendar.

Admin

  • Select the instructor or resource.
  • Click Remove Calendar.

Instructors

Microsoft Outlook

  • Navigate to your Microsoft Account Settings > Privacy > Apps and Services.
  • Click Edit under the Administrate app.
  • Revoke permissions.

Google Calendar

  • Navigate to your Google Account Settings > Data and Privacy > Apps and Services.
  • Under Third-party apps and services, click Administrate CalendarSync and delete all connections.

Admin approval (Microsoft Outlook)

Microsoft admin approval screen for Administrate Calendar Sync

If a user attempts to connect their calendar with the Administrate app without prior admin consent, they may encounter a screen asking for an administrator to sign in.

Ask an administrator of your Microsoft Entra tenant to visit the following URL, replacing {organization} with the ID of your Microsoft Entra tenant:

https://login.microsoftonline.com/{organization}/v2.0/adminconsent?client_id=fc041421-0ea2-4421-847a-4f0505675f6c&scope=https://graph.microsoft.com/.default%20offline_access

After signing in to Microsoft Entra, the administrator can grant permission for all users on the Microsoft Entra tenant to use Administrate Calendar Sync.

Technical specification document

Please refer to the technical documentation:

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