Calendar publsihing

October 6, 2010 7:44 AM

Is it possible to publish a calendar from the Mac iCal app to Gmail account calendar?

Googling suggests that this might not be possible but I am asking just in case someone has found some secret route.
Basically, I want to publish/sync a calendar from iCal onto my Gmail calendar. I share a Gmail account with co-workers and would like them to see the appointments that I have stored in my Entourage calendar that I access on my Mac through iCal. I have to maintain the Entourage calendar for HR reasons and thus i can't just shift all my calendars to Gmail and use that exclusively.

posted by SueDenim to computers & internet (7 answers total)

If your Entourage calendar is on a visible webdav/caldav setup, then you shouldn't have any problems.

What have you tried so far?
What happens when you enter the URL?
posted by unixrat at 8:03 AM on October 6, 2010

Busysync does this very well. We're using this for our school district's Google Apps deployment.

http://www.busysync.net/busysync/index.html
posted by rryan at 8:08 AM on October 6, 2010

This may be more work than you want to do but GCalDaemon has a sync to Google from iCal
posted by stuartmm at 8:37 AM on October 6, 2010

So, what you're asking is if you can push an iCal calendar to Google Calendar. I don't believe it's possible right now without purchasing a hosting service. What most people do is set the google cal to be a webdav account, and use ical to sync/edit that calendar. You want it to go the other way around.

However, since what you really really need is this entourage calendar across all 3, you should be in luck. It sounds like the entorage calendar is hosted someplace on company servers. Run the Entorage webdav URL into google cal, and into iCal.

The iCal menu option you're looking for is "subscribe".

This should work, but also be aware that iCal will sometimes choke up on sync with webdav calendars. Restarting iCal usually works. It's slightly annoying, and a known issue.

Also, if you don't have Snow Leopard, think about upgrading. There was a large update to iCal, Mail.app and Address Book.
posted by fontophilic at 9:06 AM on October 6, 2010

You can do it. But you have to have iCal access the Google cal first, not the other way around.

Start by exporting all your iCal stuff to a backup .ics file. Then delete your iCal calendar. (Really.)

Next, open the Google calendar you want to use, and import the backed-up iCal .ics to get all your calendar stuff into Gcal.

Finally, in iCal, add a new account, choose "Google" and enter the user name / password for that calendar account.

Two way sync done. I did this for both my wife's calendar, my own home and work calendars, and a shared calendar account for my lab. I get two-way sync for all calendars between iCal and Google, and between Google and my iPhone. It's nice.

Subscribing read-write to multiple calendars that are hosted within one Google account is possible, but it takes a little more work - you have to set up the initial calendar, then in iCal prefs go to the "delegation" tab for that account and check off the other calendars you need to access via iCal. They will show up under a "Delegates" category in iCal, under an expandable list. For example my "Work" calendar (hosted by the same Gcal account in which my "Home" calendar is primary) shows up as "Delegates --> Work --> Work". But it's read-write just the same as my "Home" calendar, which shows up in a subcategory of "[e-mail]".

I don't remember if you need to do anything fancy on the Google end to be able to add delegates. I don't think you do, it should just work. Whether Entourage will be able to pull all of this in is questionable, but if all it does is read from iCal it probably won't be an issue.

The only thing you will need to double-check after doing this is the alarm settings - by default iCal likes to ignore alarms in some of the calendars (delegates, I think) so you'll need to get info for your calendars and make sure the settings for "Ignore alarms", etc. are as you prefer.
posted by caution live frogs at 9:59 AM on October 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

Also, the new Office has a full Outlook client, for better or for worse. Might help solve (or cause) some problems. I personally despise Outlook and didn't install it, so I can't test it to see what it does with my iCal calendars.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:01 AM on October 6, 2010

thanks guys, i will try some of these suggestions asap and report back
posted by SueDenim at 10:53 AM on October 6, 2010