You can easily integrate your ChMS calendar with any other calendar software that can consume Internet Calendars, such as Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook.
This can, among other things, help you view ministry events in tandem with your own personal events and avoid double booking—or simply keep up with when certain staff or volunteers will be on vacation!
Note: To share your calendar, you'll need to first create a calendar view. Learn how to create a calendar view.
Here's a quick video on integrating with Microsoft Outlook. The steps to integrate with other calendar software providers will be very similar.
How to Integrate (Subscribe) to your Calendar
While we suggest embedding your calendar for the public (because updates are real-time), subscribing to your calendar in another calendar provider (e.g., Google Calendar) can help view your personal events in tandem with your ministry events.
- At the bottom left of the Calendar screen, click on the Views button.
- You'll see a Gear Icon next to each view. Click the gear icon next to the Calendar View to which you want to subscribe. This will open the Edit View dialog window.
- Under the Calendar Feed heading, copy the Feed URL provided.
- Follow the instructions from your 3rd party calendar software and paste this URL where instructed.
Important Note: New events you add will not immediately appear in your 3rd party calendar.
After your initial calendar subscription, when you create new calendar events, they will not immediately appear in your 3rd party calendar software like Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook.
Our ChMS Calendar will "push" out a calendar update every 15 minutes.
However, your third-party calendar software still needs to "pull" (request/sync) those new events before they will display. (In other words, when you add a new event, we cannot control how often a third-party calendar software "asks" or "pulls in" for event updates.)
For example, Google Calendar documentation says it updates "every few hours." However, in our experience, it can take as much as 6-24 hours for a new event to be pulled into the calendar.
Pro-Tip: For public-facing calendar updates where minutes count, we suggest embedding your ChMS calendar on your website so that event updates appear in real time.
Updated