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Overview: How Calendar Sync works, and what it's for
Overview: How Calendar Sync works, and what it's for

An overview of how Reclaim's Calendar Sync works and what it's for (and importantly, whether you need to use it for your calendar).

Updated over 2 months ago

Reclaim's Calendar Sync feature is a powerful way to make sure people who go to book time with you always see your true availability across multiple calendars.

Calendar Sync takes events from a source calendar - we call these source events - and creates smart copies of them on a destination calendar - we call these synced copies.

Synced copies stay up-to-date as the source events change, so you never have to worry about manually updating or adding events across calendars. Reclaim gives you flexible privacy options for those synced copies so you can manage what others are able to see.

Do I need Calendar Sync?

Calendar Sync is extremely valuable if you have a calendar that is visible to others (e.g., in your workplace) and where people can book time with you directly on that calendar. By using Calendar Sync, you can ensure that anyone viewing your calendar can see when you're busy for events from other schedules.

However, if your goal is only to let Reclaim know which calendars to check for your availability, and you're not in a workplace where people are booking time with you directly, you likely want to use Connected Calendars instead.

Read this doc for more info about the differences between Connected Calendars and Calendar Sync.

Requirements for using Calendar Sync

Currently, Calendar Sync is only supported for calendars connected to a Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook account (Outlook support in early beta). Because Reclaim requires read and write permissions on your calendars in order to sync events, it can only work with services where we are able to authenticate a user account.
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You may use a source calendar that is hosted by iCloud, or other services, and share it to a Google Calendar, though you may experience long delays in events synced from shared calendars.

How Calendar Sync works

Reclaim creates synced copies of your source events, keeps them up-to-date with changes, and makes it easy to manage all your events and your availability from a single calendar. You can manage your synced calendars from the Calendar Sync page in the app (learn more about creating a sync policy here).

When an event is created on a source calendar, you'll see a synced copy for the same time period appear on the target calendar. This synced copy has its own privacy setting and is visible to others, preventing those who view your destination calendar from booking over your source events:

This way, you can avoid being double booked across schedules because others could not see you were busy.

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