[Building Sakai] Google Calendar Integration

[Adam Marshall]

We have the following about Google's delay in our FAQ:

I have subscribed my Google calendar to a WebLearn calendar but some (WebLearn) events are out of date?

    A: It appears that there are some caching issues with Google Calendars: we think that Google only looks for event IDs that have appeared or disappeared, so it only recognises new / removed events; events that have just been edited do not generally seem to be picked up. You can 'force' an update within a day if, instead of changing the date / time or location of an event, you actually delete it and then add it in again with up to date details. This means that last-minute changes will not appear in a Google calendar and will need to be flagged up to students in an alternative way - Email; WebLearn Announcements Tool or even the University's SMS Text Messaging service which allows you to text students in the same way as you would send them an email - 3p a message.

We have also found a similar delay with Exchange's OWA web client. Apparently, in theory, it should all work OK but there are bugs which mean a linked calendar takes a very long time to show up in OWA and the updating suffers unpredictable delays . These two factors means that it isn't really possible to subscribe to a 'private Sakai URL' with any great confidence.

adam


-----Original Message-----
From: sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Keli Sato Amann
Sent: 07 September 2012 23:06
To: Savitha Prakash
Cc: sakai-dev
Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] Google Calendar Integration

Hi Savitha,
.

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