DRAFT

The calendar, with its useful reminders, can even be used to remind you of small tasks you need to achieve during a day.

This is important to train our users to properly use their Google calendar to enter their vacation (or meetings). This should be done at least in their own calendar so that their colleagues can know their availability. But ideally, a group calendar can be used to easily see who, in a team, is going to be busy or available at a given date. 

A useful feature in Google Calendar is the Find Time (orif you display more options). This allows you to check colleagues availability to find a good time to meet. Obviously users have to keep their calendar up to date for this to work well.

Group calendars and resources. Group calendars allow you to book important dates for a special purpose for a group of people. This calendar can then be added on Google Calendar for those who need to have this information. For example you might want to create a Group calendar for the vacations in your entity and or a group calendar for important meetings.

Resources are something different. You can ask GTIS to create a resource for a car, a physical room, a virtual room such as a Zoom room, a video projector etc… Then, when you create a calendar event, you can book this resource at the same time.

To book a resource, when creating a meeting click

or click the Rooms tab if you see more options.

Working hours and location. In Google calendar you can set your working hours. Doing this will allow your colleagues to see if the meeting they invite you to join is inside your working hours or not. This is especially important when working across multiple time zones. You can find this setting in Calendar settings

Do not forget to set your own Time zone correctly. You can even add someone else's Time zone to quickly show what time it is in your colleague’s country.

It can be interesting to add other calendars. 

You can browse resources calendar

You can add calendars of Interest

Or add a group calendar

Ask someone to send you the public URL of the calendar, open it, and at the bottom right corner click to add it to your calendar.

It might be helpful that some specific people share their calendar with someone else, like the Director with his/her assistant. You can either share their calendar or show them how to request access to someone else's calendar. 

Notice that if you press the ? key you will open the shortcuts keys help, which contains helpful information on how to jump quickly and easily to a calendar feature.

You can look at this video for more tips on Google calendars.