Google Calendar syncing.. Experience with it?

So I figured out that you can sync your Google Calendar with SuiteCRM after doing some searching on Duck Duck go:

But It seems it is currently in beta this feature…
So I’m a bit hesitating to put the work in if it is not working properly.

So I’d like to know you good people’s experience with it… :smiley:

Is it good enough and stable enough for production? Is it worth pursuing? :thinking:

I’d love to use it for our company but no point of course of setting up if it doesn’t work. :upside_down_face:

Thanks a lot in advance for sharing what you thinks about this calendar feature.

Kind regards
PowerQuest

Hmmmm :thinking:
No one here that can tell anything about this please?

Thanks again.
Kind regards
PowerQuest

I don’t use it, but I get the impression that it’s working and people use it. Sometimes I see people getting problems setting it up, but eventually it works…

Ok thanks a bunch @pgr for the reply and sharing. I do appreciate that a lot. :+1:

I wish however that there was more that could share some experience with the calendar sync though. But it is what it is. :smirk:

Kind regards
PowerQuest

Hey @PowerQuest I’ve set up the Google Calendar Sync. Here’ s my experience.

It did not work, got a bunch of errors. I posted here in the forum and the developer reached out to me and was super helpful via Slack to get it working. He made some changes to the code (it had something to do with the version of MySQL my server was running) and it worked. It worked great for a couple months, then the next update it stopped working again. Just haven’t had the time to reach out to him again.

Some things you should know, it probably doesn’t work like you think it would. For example if you create an entry in your google calendar it will not sync to SuiteCRM. Conversely, if you add a meeting to SuiteCRM it does not end up in your personal calendar. I creates a separate calendar “SuiteCRM” which does sync to SuiteCRM. So if you want your personal calendar items to appear in the SuiteCRM calendar, you have to either copy them to the SuiteCRM calendar in Google or just add them there in the first place. Also, SuiteCRM Meetings appear in the Google “SuiteCRM” calendar, not your personal calendar.

Long story short, it takes some getting used to. When it worked it was pretty useful. You can absolutely try it on production, I wouldn’t role it out to clients or staff quite yet (at least in my experience so far). However, it won’t crash your system or anything if you set it up.

3 Likes

Hi @pstevens

Thank you so much for taking some time to write down and sharing your experience with the SuiteCRM calendar syncing.

Well that sounds a bit disappointing. I was hoping I could use it for lead generation at our website where potential clients could book a meeting with our sales reps directly and it would then be synced with their calendars. But with what you shared here it doesn’t seem to be worth the effort because its bugged from the start and will need the attention of being re-coded at every new SuiteCRM update.

Well that just leaves to wishes then that the SuiteCRM @Team does something about this feature and improves it. Plus removing the part that is makes a secondary calendar which is quite annoying as you do (I suppose most want it like that), want to be able to sync directly into your personal calendar so it merges with your already existing appointments and other planned duties that you have in your personal calendar.

Thank you so much again.
Kind regards
PowerQuest

To be fair to the SuiteCRM team, this Time issues are a nightmare! You have to be so very careful to get everything absolutely exact! If you set the wrong time zone/wrong date/time format etc then everything goes wrong VERY QUICKLY. Unfortunately in my experience with different users in different areas of the world, I had a huge number of support requests, (because every user can change their own preferred formats) I eventually removed much of the calendaring sync capability and forced then to use the Google calendars…someone else’s problem? :innocent: