Calendar

When scheduling meetings at UCD, you can (opens in a new window)browse calendars to see colleagues' availability. By default, all event details are private and anyone viewing your calendar will only see slots as Free or Busy. However, you may choose to make your calendar open to everyone at UCD, or (opens in a new window)share calendar details with selected colleagues and/or Google Groups e.g. your unit teammates.

In this screenshot, the purple denotes a colleague's calendar where all events details are private, whereas the blue shows a calendar where that colleague has made their event details visible:

At UCD IT Services, we recommend you (opens in a new window)share calendar details with your immediate team or collaborators, if appropriate. This way, your colleagues can easily see and schedule you at convenient times, avoiding back-and-forth email chains. 

Tip: You can still mark individual calendar events as Private, so if there are events where you don't wish to share details, you can make them private. Those events then show only as Free/Busy to all, except invitees.

To show people when you're generally available (and unavailable!) for meetings, and what days you will be working from home and on campus, turn on the (opens in a new window)Working hours and location settings in your Google Calendar.

You may also set a working location for a portion of a day. 

These settings are especially useful if you regularly work half-days, or from another location, as anyone who tries to send you a calendar invitation for a time outside your working hours will then get notified of this. 

Anyone at UCD can easily (opens in a new window)create a shared calendar. These are a very useful resource to use as a team e.g. to track and organise annual leave, team meetings, project delivery dates and other team events, all visible at a glance to anyone who subscribes to that calendar. 

This short video (0:41) from Google illustrates how to create and share a team calendar:

As well as an (opens in a new window)out of office message for your email, you can also set one in your calendar. 

We recommend you use this as well as setting your email autoresponse.

• If colleagues are checking your availability for meetings, they can immediately see you are unavailable. 
• The out of office setting in Google Calendar will also send an automatic 'declined' reply to any invitations to meetings scheduled for your out-of-office calendar period. 

Find instructions in the (opens in a new window)IT Support Hub.