Google Apps Calendar Sharing

I love Google Calendars. In particular, I love the ability to share a calendar with someone else, even allowing them to add items and/or update your calendar. Google Apps Calendars has this ability as well. This is invaluable for me in my organization as well as at home.

My wife and I share our calendars, and now our 17-year-old son does as well. We also share a set of family calendars. This helps each of us to understand how our individual time is used, as well as how our time relates to one another. If one of us wants to set up an appointment, a social event or some other time commitment that involves the other, we need only to consult our calendar in order to be reasonably certain that the time is available. This is hugely useful with our family of 5.

By default Google Apps Calendar sharing is limited to within your Apps organization. To get around this requires the ability to administer your Google Apps domain. If you need this ability, and you are not the administrator of the domain, consult your administrator.

If you are a Google Apps domain administrator, here is what you need to do:

1) Log in to your Google Apps dashboard ( www.google.com/a/yourdomain.com ).

2) Click on Calendars.

3) Change the default sharing to allow sharing outside of your organization.

That's it. Except for one thing: the change is not instant. Plus, the setting for this change seems to get cached into your local user browser cache. So, the following steps may be necessary if you don't have the ability to setup sharing outside of your organization even after making this change:

1) Log out of your Google Apps account.

2) Clear your browser's cache.

3) Quit and reopen your browser, and log back in.

You should now be able to change your sharing settings.

This raises an issue about how aggressive Google is about caching data locally. Ordinarily this is a good thing in terms of sparing you from long downloads every time your access your Google account. But it seems to go as far as caching domain-level settings, and this can be frustrating when, as an administrator, you are trying to push out changes to lots of users.

Just remember that even in today's world of very stable browsers, emptying your browser cache can do wonders.