Apple iCalendar Sync

If you are a TimeTap Professional or TimeTap Business user, you can sync each of your staff accounts with one or multiple iCal accounts. Using Apple iCal sync will allow you to:

1. See all of your TimeTap appointments on iCalendar and whatever devices you run that on
2. All of your iCalendar appointments where you are listed as "Busy" will sync to TimeTap and block off your availability so no clients can book appointments at that time
3. Add appointments to an iCalendar that you and your colleagues contribute to
4. Sync appointments to multiple iCalendars and sub-calendars
   
   

In this documentation we'll go through:

After reading this documentation head over to the other documents where we talk about some of the great features iCal sync has to offer. 

In order to set up Apple iCalendar Sync, Click on your name on the top right corner of the screen and select My Profile:

From the staff profile view, click on the "Calendar Sync" tab:

Inside the calendar sync tab, you'll see the option for syncing your iCalendar to TimeTap. Press the iCal logo:

This will take you through to the gateway that we use to sync with iCal. Choose iCal again from this gateway:

You'll be prompted to login with your Apple ID and password in order to authorize that TimeTap can access your calendar, click "Link Apple Account" enter you've entered your credentials:

Once you authorize, you'll be taken back to TimeTap. Your sync will start to run. The first sync typically takes about 30 minutes to complete. After that the calendars update automatically about every 15-20 minutes.

To view which appointments are syncing between TimeTap and your iCal, you can click the View Feed button, located under the "Actions" column in the iCal Sync Feeds section of your Calendar Sync view:

Once you've clicked the View Feed button a new window will appear, informing you of the most recent appointments synced from your iCal Calendar. In the example below I can see that three appointments from my iCal Calendar have synced to my TimeTap calendar:

The table shown in this new window is broken down in 6 columns, each showing a different piece of information

1. ID: This is the ID assigned to this appointment in TimeTap, you can use this number to search for this specific appointment in TimeTap
2. Starts at: This is the time and date the appointment begins
3. Ends at: This is the time and date the appointment ends
4. Subject: This is the information entered in the subject field in your iCal Calendar at the time the appointment was created
5. Loaded: Lets you know if the appointment was successfully loaded into TimeTap
6. Info: 
   1. If the appointment was loaded, then this will tell you the last time the appointment was updated in iCal; 
   2. If the appointment wasn't loaded (i.e., it is a TimeTap appointment or it is a iCal appointment which you are listed as "Available" for) then the info section will tell you why it wasn't loaded

If you are looking at your appointment sync feed and you see a red x in the loaded column, don't panic. This red x means that the appointment had synced to your iCal Calendar and when iCal sent information to sync your TimeTap account, TimeTap rejected the appointment because it was already in your calendar or because it was a iCal Calendar appointment where you are listed as "Available":

When looking at your calendar view under the Appointments section, you will see iCal Calendar appointments come in with the prefix [ext] next to them:

Here is a close up:

The [ext] implies that this appointment is coming from an external calendar source. If you click on it, you will enter into the Time Off detail screen:

If you need to make changes to the iCal Calendar appointment, you will need to login into the associated iCal Account to make those changes. If you try to make changes to a iCal Calendar appointment from TimeTap, you will get an error message that you cannot make changes to that appointment:

When looking at your iCal Calendar, you will see all TimeTap appointments come through with a [tt] in front of the name of the appointment:

Here it is close up:

If you open the appointment up on your iCal Calendar, you will see that TimeTap is also listed as the source for the appointment:

It is not recommended that you make any changes to TimeTap appointments inside iCal. While iCal will allow you to, it will likely result in more confusion than anything. We recommend that if you need to make any changes to TimeTap appointments that you login to TimeTap to make those changes.

If you need to stop the sync between TimeTap and your or one of your staff member's iCal Calendar, simply go back to the staff profile for the account you wish to stop syncing and click on the "Calendar Sync" tab:

Under the Calendar Sync tab, you can press the red button to "Stop Sync":

A new window will appears where you will have to confirm that you want to stop the sync:

You'll get a small confirmation that the sync has been stopped:

And then your Calendar Sync tab will return to how it was before you initiated the sync:

We have just finished syncing and un-syncing with one iCal Calendar, we will discuss how to sync with multiple calendars, what appointments to upload or not upload, how we want TimeTap appointments to appear in your iCal Calendar, and allow other users to collaborate in a calendar, click here to read this documentation.

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