Google & Outlook Meetings on the Calendar

Connect your Google Calendar or Outlook calendar and your meetings appear on the Calendar page next to your tasks, tickets and project dates, so you can plan your work around them.

Overview

Each staff member connects their own calendar by pasting its private calendar address (an iCal or .ics link). ClientCove reads that calendar and shows your meetings on the Calendar.

• Meetings are read-only. To change or cancel one, use Google Calendar or Outlook.
• Only you see your meetings. Nobody else's calendar is ever shown to you, and yours is never shown to them.
• You can connect up to 5 calendars, for example a work calendar and a shared team calendar.

Connecting a Calendar

1. Open the Calendar page.
2. Click My calendars next to the filters. The My calendars panel opens above the calendar.
3. Paste your calendar's address into Calendar address (iCal / .ics). See Finding Your Calendar Address.
4. Optionally, give it a name under Name (optional), such as "Work calendar". If you leave it blank, it is named Google Calendar, Outlook or Calendar.
5. Click Add calendar address, or press Enter.

The button shows Checking… while ClientCove makes sure the address really returns a calendar. When it works, you'll see Connected. Meetings now show under All types and Meetings. and your meetings appear straight away.

Addresses starting with webcal:// work too; ClientCove converts them to https://.

Finding Your Calendar Address

Click Where do I find this address? in the panel for a short version of these steps.

Google Calendar

1. Open Google Calendar on a computer and click the gear icon, then Settings.
2. Under Settings for my calendars on the left, click the calendar you want to connect.
3. Click Integrate calendar.
4. Copy the Secret address in iCal format.

Outlook and Microsoft 365

1. Open Outlook on the web and click the gear icon (Settings).
2. Go to Calendar → Shared calendars.
3. Under Publish a calendar, choose the calendar and Can view all details, then click Publish.
4. Copy the ICS link.

If you publish with Can view titles and locations or Can view when I'm busy instead, the Calendar shows only that much, for example just "Busy" blocks.

Seeing Your Meetings

Meetings appear as violet items on the calendar, with their start time. Items from Google or Outlook that last all day, such as holidays or out-of-office days, appear as all-day items.

• All types in the Type filter includes your meetings. Choose Meetings to see only meetings.
• A meeting's location, if it has one, shows under its title. Hover over a meeting to see its location and which of your calendars it came from.
• Click a meeting to see its details: who you're meeting, when and where, and a button to join the call. See Meeting Details.
• Repeating meetings show every occurrence, including one-off changes and cancellations you made to single occurrences.
• Meetings can't be dragged to another day.

Meeting Details

Click any meeting on the Calendar to open its details. You can see:

• When: the date and the start and end times, in your own time zone. All-day items say All day.
• Where: the meeting's location, if it has one.
• Join call: a button that opens the video call, when the meeting has a Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, Whereby or GoTo link.
• The meeting's own link, if it has one that isn't a video call, such as a document or another call service.
• Organized by: who sent the invite.
• Guests: everyone invited, with a summary such as 4 guests · 1 yes, 1 maybe, 1 no, 1 awaiting. Each guest has a mark for their reply: a green tick for going, a yellow question mark for maybe, a red cross (and their name crossed out) for not going, and an empty circle for no reply yet.
• Notes: the meeting's description as plain text, with its links clickable.
• Open in Google Calendar or Open in Outlook: opens that day in your calendar, where the meeting is one click away.

Close the window with the ×, the Esc key, or by clicking outside it. On a phone it slides up from the bottom of the screen.

What you see depends on what your calendar shares through its address:

• A Google Secret address in iCal format includes guests, replies and notes.
• An Outlook calendar published with Can view all details includes them too. With Can view titles and locations or Can view when I'm busy, the window shows only the time, and the title and place where they're shared.

The block of joining instructions that Google Meet and Microsoft Teams add to an invite ("Join with Google Meet…", dial-in numbers and so on) is left out of the notes, because the Join call button does the same job.

Refreshing and Disconnecting

ClientCove re-reads each connected calendar about every 15 minutes. To pick up a change sooner, open My calendars and click Refresh.

After you start a meeting with Schedule meeting and save it in Google Calendar or Outlook, coming back to the Calendar page re-reads your calendars on its own, and once more a minute later. This happens for 30 minutes after you open the meeting in your calendar, so you don't need to click Refresh. Google can still take a while to publish the meeting; see Notes & Gotchas.

To stop showing a calendar:

1. Open My calendars.
2. Click Disconnect next to the calendar.
3. Confirm. Its meetings disappear from the Calendar.

Each connected calendar is listed by its name and a short hint of its address, such as calendar.google.com …a1b2, so you can tell calendars apart. The full address is never shown again after you connect it.

Privacy

• Your meetings show only on your Calendar page. In Team view, managers still see only their own meetings, never anyone else's.
• Meetings never show on a client's Calendar tab, on a project's Calendar, or on dashboard widgets.
• Clients never see meetings. The Calendar is a staff-only page.
• The calendar address is stored with your user account. It is only used to read your calendar and is never sent back to your browser.
• The guests, replies and notes in the details window come from your own calendar and are shown only to you.

Troubleshooting

Message	What to do
The calendar address must start with https:// or webcal://.	Copy the full address again, including the beginning.
That address did not return a calendar (.ics) file.	You probably copied a page link (such as the link to open Google Calendar) instead of the calendar address. Use the iCal / ICS address from the steps above.
The calendar refused the link (HTTP 404). followed by a Google tip	For a Google address containing /public/, the calendar isn't shared publicly (many Google Workspace accounts don't allow it). Use its Secret address in iCal format instead. For a secret address, it was probably reset: copy the current Secret address in iCal format and connect that.
The calendar refused the link (HTTP 404). It may have been reset or unpublished.	The address was reset, or the calendar was unpublished in Outlook. Get a new address and connect it again.
That calendar is already connected.	It's already in your list, so nothing needs doing.
You can connect up to 5 calendars.	Disconnect one you no longer need first.

If a calendar that used to work stops loading, the Calendar shows Could not load: meeting. at the top. Your tasks, tickets and projects still show as usual. Open My calendars, disconnect that calendar, and connect a fresh address.

Notes & Gotchas

• Google updates slowly. Google refreshes the secret address on its own schedule, so a new or moved meeting can take several hours to appear. Neither Refresh nor the automatic re-read after scheduling can speed this up. Outlook is usually quicker. The same delay applies to guests' replies in the details window.
• Read-only. ClientCove never creates, changes or deletes anything in your Google or Outlook calendar.
• Times follow your computer. Meetings show in the time zone your browser uses, even when the meeting was created in another time zone.
• The My calendars button is on the main Calendar page only, not on a client's Calendar tab.

Related Pages

• The Calendar
• Schedule a Meeting — starting a Google or Outlook meeting from a project, client or conversation
• Crew Dashboard — reviewing your team's workload