Google Calendar Permissions - Advice please

[eddyc]

Hi all,

 

I am after some advice.

 

We were alerted last week that a student had emailed a member of staff to ask about an appointment in their calendar which made us double check our permissions on Google Calendar.

 

We found that the default domain-wide setting was "Share all information" so we have changed this now to "Only free/busy information (hide event details)" as per:

 

 

I now have an issue in as much as it is generating lots of complaints, from SLT and staff, because we use Salamander to sync the SIMS timetable to each users Google Calendar - SLT and staff have historically used the quick "Meet with" search to look at another member of staffs timetable to plan learning walks, etc as they found this much quicker than using SIMS.

 

 

Is there a way to allow staff to see all of each others staff information whilst students can only see free/busy information if they were to look at a staff calendar?

 

I am being told to revert the change that I made but don't want to do this from a GDPR perspective if students can view staff calendars.

 

Any help or advice would be gratefully received.

 

Kind regards, eddyc

[paulkerton]

Is there a way to allow staff to see all of each others staff information whilst students can only see free/busy information if they were to look at a staff calendar?

Only users can set the level of internal sharing above what you set as default.

They can share with a group though. So i guess you'd ask them to share their calendar with your "slt@" or "staff@" group.

 

The only other way of doing it is making a user who needs to see all of their information a superadmin, but that'd be a very dangerous move!

[DanTheLacky]

I happened to stumbled a cross this setting yesterday while looking at Google admin, thought it was weird that it was set to that as default.

[jthompson]

If you have GAM or similar available you will be able to manage ACLs for calendars using that rather than having to direct staff to do it themselves (https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM/wiki/CalendarExamples#viewing-a-calenders-acl). You'd need a calendar's ID in order to modify it's ACL. As already mentioned, you can specify groups in ACLs, so you can leave the default as free/busy but add staff groups into staff members' timetable calendars with 'read' privileges. Edited March 11, 2020 by jthompson

[eddyc]

Only users can set the level of internal sharing above what you set as default.

They can share with a group though. So i guess you'd ask them to share their calendar with your "slt@" or "staff@" group.

 

The only other way of doing it is making a user who needs to see all of their information a superadmin, but that'd be a very dangerous move!

 

Salamander shared all of our staff calendars with staff@ which has worked well for us. :-)