[Building Sakai] Google Calendar Integration

Fri Sep 7 15:06:13 PDT 2012

Hi Savitha,
If you need Lydia Li to make more technical comments on this, please contact her but I can give an overview of what we recently did at Stanford (was presented at the conference this summer). We did a pilot with our business school (GSB) by creating a new tool that stores events directly into section-specific Google calendars but adapted the front end interface of the Schedule tool. The hope was that this would allow us to make it easier to preserve certain integrations--Tests & Quizzes, Assignments, and Signup all publish to Schedule.

Creating section specific calendars is not ideal, but at the time, seemed the best option. That is, to have an event for sections 1 and 3, you have to add that same event, say "midterm," onto two separate calendars. That was fine if all events were at different times for each section (as was the case for our pilot), but not if certain events happened jointly (as is the case for several classes outside the GSB). Ideally we would have liked to have each event have its own permissions, such that you can add sections 1 and 3 (but not 2) to an event; this is how CLE's Schedule works. This was possible in Google Calendar, but our understanding is that if we added a group to an event, it would actually break that out and record it as individuals. If the makeup of the group changed midway through the term, I had gotten the impression that would not work. I heard Michigan is handling groups differently so that maybe this isn't an issue; I think we are trying to set up a call between our ITS (which is not the department we are in) and someone from your school. I think handling this more gracefully will be a requirement if we are to move beyond a pilot, as the use cases of how events and sections interact are more complex.

Also, an important pieces of feedback from the students was that a mobile view of calendar was absolutely necessary. A lot of the reason the GSB wanted this was for adding assignment information for each session (topics, readings) and so the course admins wanted to the event description to preserve the formatting (bold, bullets) from the syllabus. So this had to get entered into Google as html code (no rich text editor in Google). Unfortunately, while this showed up nicely in the CLE tool we built, smart phones showed the html code within the event descriptions of their calendar app. Assuming we want to take advantage of the calendar app (it can send reminders, toggle other personal calendar on, etc.), we're trying to see if formatted text is actually that important.

Ideally, I actually would have liked to have adopted Oxford's fix of allowing users to take a URL from the synoptic Calendar and add it by URL within GCal. Unfortunately, if an instructor updated the Sakai Calendar, we have no control over how soon that change would appears in Google. Google acknowledges the problem here, but has no estimate on when this will get fixed (http://support.google.com/a/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=known_issues.cs). 

Keli Amann
User Experience Specialist
Academic Computing Services, Stanford University

----- Original Message -----
From: "Savitha Prakash" <savithap at umich.edu>
To: "William Karavites" <willkara at oit.rutgers.edu>, "sakai-dev" <sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 6, 2012 7:32:10 AM
Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] Google Calendar Integration

Thanks Will. We will keep you posted. 

- Savitha 

On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 3:53 PM, William Karavites < willkara at oit.rutgers.edu > wrote: 

Rutgers is definitely interested in trying to get Google Calendar Integration, so please keep me updated in the work you do and if you need any help. 

Our wish is to be able to have a calendar on Sakai be reflected to a calendar on GoogleApps since most students now-a-days use Google. 

-Will 

------------------------------------ 
William Karavites 
Application Programmer 
OIT/OIRT- Rutgers University 
Office: 732-445-8726 
Cell: 732-822-9405 
willkara at rutgers.edu 
------------------------------------ 

From: "Savitha Prakash" < savithap at umich.edu > 
To: "sakai-dev" < sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org > 
Sent: Wednesday, September 5, 2012 3:17:57 PM 
Subject: [Building Sakai] Google Calendar Integration 

We have been investigating and working towards integrating Google Calendars with Sakai. This is especially attractive feature for University of Michigan, since UOfM has collaboration with google, and I am sure many other institutions will be interested in this as well. 

So far this is what we have come up with: 
Develop a new Sakai CLE tool for Google Calendars, which when added to a site creates a new google calendar for the site, and auto-provisions the site participants. All the sakai roles can be matched up to google calendar permissions. Sakai will be using Google Calendar API v3 client libraries to interact with Google at the back-end. 

For the front-end, among the various JQuery Calendar plugin, FullCalendar plugin seemed attractive. This is quite popular, extensively used, and has integration with Google Calendar. However, FullCalendar supports Google-Calendar-Api-v2, which is being depreciated by google, and it currently does not have support for Google-Calendar-Api-v3. I have added a ticket to fullcalendar requesting the support ( http://code.google.com/p/fullcalendar/issues/detail?id=1526&thanks=1526&ts=1346868483 ), but if no support added in the near future, we may have to add and maintain our own translation, between gc-v3 and full-calendar. Thoughts? 

Have anybody tried there hands with fullcalendar and do you know of any better alternative to it. I am also interested to hear of any similar effort happening in the community for Google-Calendar integration with Sakai, and any suggestions, thoughts and ideas you may have. 

Thanks, 
-- 
Savitha Prakash 
Application Analyst 
ITS Teaching & Learning 
University of Michigan 

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-- 
Savitha Prakash 
Application Analyst 
ITS Teaching & Learning 
University of Michigan 

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