Please note: This article is about Skedda's iCal feeds. If you have a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 tenant, we have a comprehensive 'direct' integration with it. See the corresponding article here.
Skedda offers iCal feeds at both the venue level and individual level in order to pull booking information in a read-only manner into external calendars (Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, etc.).
If you're subscribed to AllBooked Core, you'll need our Integrations add-on to sync to your external calendar.
Check out our FAQs if you have any additional questions about the calendar syncing!
Types of calendar syncs
Venue-level iCal feeds enable administrators to pull all venue booking information (optionally filtered by space) into an external calendar.
User-level iCal feeds enable each user to subscribe to and pull just their own bookings from Skedda into their external calendar.
Get the iCal link
For venue-level syncing, head to the 'Integrations' settings page and copy the iCal link. You can also filter by spaces if required (by default, bookings for all spaces are included in the feed).
For user-level syncing, you or your users can go into My Profile > Personal Calendar Feed and copy the link. This one only syncs calendar events that belong to that specific user only.
Put the iCal link in your calendar
Once you have the link, the next step will vary by application and version, however, the general idea is to paste the link into the external calendar's feature for adding a calendar. This feature will be called something like 'Add by URL', 'Add external calendar' or 'Add calendar from internet'
Google Calendar
Under Other calendars select the '+' icon and choose 'From URL'. Paste your link in the URL of the calendar field.
Then you can find the new calendar in your settings and rename it, choose to receive notifications, etc. See minute two in the video above for more details.
Outlook
Select 'Add Calendar' from the sidebar. In the pop-up window, choose 'Subscribe from web'. Paste your link, set a name, choose a color/icon and select 'Import'. See minute three in the video above for more details.
Once you've added the link to your external calendar, it will automatically fetch updated booking information from Skedda periodically. The frequency of this fetch is up to your external calendar provider, this can't be controlled by Skedda (read more below).
If you need some additional help with setting this up for your calendar type, try googling 'How to add an iCalendar link to Outlook/Google/Apple', or reach out with your questions and we'll be able to guide you through!
FAQs
Can I extend the range of bookings that are synced?
Yes, we can go further into the future! By default bookings up to three months away are synced. Please reach out to the Skedda team through the chat widget in the bottom right if you need a broader window. The 1 month into the past is a hard limit and cannot be changed.
Can I invalidate the links I've generated in the past?
Yes, to do this you can reset the security key. This will invalidate all previous iCal links. Find this option just below the iCal link area.
I made a booking in Skedda, but it's not showing up in my calendar. What's going on?
The calendar fetches Skedda bookings through the iCal link (Skedda doesn't push them), so your calendar may just be a little slow. If you use Google Calendar, check out the next FAQ. For Outlook, this isn't possible to customize and unfortunately, there isn't a way to set the refresh speed. For Apple, it is possible to set the refresh time (see minute 4 in the video above).
The Google Calendar sync time is too slow for me! Can we speed it up?
Yes! Although Google updates the calendar automatically from the Skedda feed, Google Calendar is somewhat less frequent than all other calendar apps. Google themselves quote it may take up to 12 hours. We've noticed that it's more like every four hours or so.
We have found a way to run a script within your Google Calendar to make this super fast! Here is a video and here is the code.
Since we didn't write this script, we can't officially support you if it doesn't behave exactly as intended! However, we've tested it personally and it seems to work nicely with Skedda.