Calendar

Connecting your Google, Microsoft 365 or iCloud calendar, so that meetings with contacts are logged and scheduled calls and meetings reach your calendar.

A meeting with a contact belongs in two places: your calendar, where you plan your day, and the contact's timeline, where the team sees what happened. Connect your calendar and Alba Ticket keeps the two in step, in both directions.

It works with Google Calendar and Microsoft 365 (Outlook), where an administrator has set the provider up, and with iCloud, which needs no setting up and is there once an administrator has switched it on (see Calendars). Each member connects their own calendar; nobody connects one for somebody else.

Connecting your calendar

On your account page, under Calendar, press Connect Google Calendar or Connect Microsoft 365. You are sent to the provider's own page, where you choose the account and agree to what Alba Ticket asks for: to see the events on your calendar and to add its own. You come back to your account page with the calendar connected, and the first reading starts at once.

The section shows the account that is connected, when it was last read, and anything that went wrong. It is there for members who may see the CRM.

iCloud

Apple has no page to agree on, so an iCloud calendar is connected by typing two things under Connect iCloud: your Apple ID and an app-specific password. An app-specific password is one you make for a single application, in your Apple Account under Sign-In and Security, and can remove there at any time without touching your own password. Never type your Apple ID's own password; it would not work, and Alba Ticket should not have it.

Alba Ticket checks the two against iCloud before keeping anything, and says so if iCloud refuses them. It reads every calendar of the account that holds events, and adds its own events to the first of them.

Connecting an account of your own cannot be tried in the public demo workspace, whose logins are everybody's: see In the demo.

Meetings from your calendar

Every quarter of an hour, Alba Ticket looks at your calendar from two days back to sixty days ahead. For each event it reads when it is and who is invited, and nothing else. If one of the people invited is a contact (their address is on a contact in the CRM), the event is a meeting with that contact, and only then is its title and description read:

• it is logged as a meeting on the contact's timeline, and their company's, under your name, with the event's title, time, length, description and attendees;
• one that is still ahead shows as a scheduled meeting, as one you scheduled by hand would;
• it is logged once, however often the calendar is read, and once only when two members are at the same meeting;
• when the event changes, the meeting changes with it; when the event is cancelled, or the contact is no longer invited, the meeting leaves the timeline, with its history kept.

An event with no contact among its attendees is never read beyond who is invited, and nothing about it is kept: your dentist stays yours. Whole-day events are not meetings and are left alone. A meeting is logged only on contacts you may log interactions on.

iCloud is asked the same question, for each event's time and attendees alone, but it may answer with the whole event. Alba Ticket then takes the time and the attendees from what it was sent and discards the rest unread, and still keeps nothing of an event with no contact. A repeating event in iCloud is logged meeting by meeting where iCloud lists its occurrences; a series it gives only as a rule is logged for the meeting the rule starts with.

Scheduled calls and meetings

A call or a meeting you log with a time that is still ahead is scheduled, and with a calendar connected it is put in your calendar: its subject as the title, its time and length (half an hour when none is given), and in the description who it is with, your notes and a link back to Alba Ticket. That happens within moments of saving it.

• Change it in Alba Ticket and the event changes; delete it and the event is removed.
• Move the event in your calendar and the scheduled call or meeting moves with it at the next reading.
• Nobody is invited. Alba Ticket adds the event to your calendar and sends nothing to the contact; inviting them is yours to do, from your calendar.
• If you delete the event in your calendar, the scheduled interaction stays in Alba Ticket, and the event is added again the next time the interaction changes.

Only your own calls and meetings go to your calendar, never a colleague's.

Disconnecting

Disconnect beside the calendar on your account page stops both directions at once. The meetings already logged stay on their timelines, and the events Alba Ticket added stay in your calendar. With Google, Alba Ticket's access is withdrawn at Google as well. Microsoft gives an application no way to withdraw its own access, so Alba Ticket forgets its keys and you remove it under the apps of your Microsoft account if you want it gone there too. For iCloud, Alba Ticket forgets the app-specific password, and you remove that password in your Apple Account.

If you take the access away at the provider instead, the next reading fails: the connection shows as No longer connected, you are told in the bell, and Connect again puts it back (for iCloud, by typing a new app-specific password).

What is kept

Of your calendar, Alba Ticket keeps the meetings with contacts it logged, as interactions, and the address of the account you connected. It keeps the keys to the connection (for iCloud, your Apple ID and the app-specific password) encrypted, never shows them, and never includes them in an export of the workspace. A contact's meetings are part of their data: they are in an export of the contact and go when the contact is erased.