Calendar

The Calendar app shows the events of a calendar you already keep, in Google, Outlook, or iCloud, for example. For a calendar subscription you only need the calendar’s ICS address. An Outlook or Google calendar that your organization has connected under Data sources works too.

What the app shows#

The app comes with one widget: Calendar. It shows the events of one calendar of your organization with time, title, and, where available, location. Recurring events, exceptions, and individually moved occurrences are taken into account, including series such as “every last Friday of the month”.

You create the calendar subscriptions themselves once, with a name and an address. After that, a widget names only the calendar, never its address. The address stays with us and appears neither in a scene nor on a display. This matters because almost every calendar subscription address contains an access key: Anyone who knows it can read the calendar.

The events come from one of two origins. Calendar subscription reads an address (ICS). Microsoft or Google reads an Outlook calendar from Microsoft 365 or a Google calendar that your organization has connected under Data sources. On the display, both look the same.

The widget arranges itself to fit its frame. Making it wider never removes anything.

• Day list — today with the current event highlighted and its time left, and the next day with events at the foot.
• Column — in tall, narrow frames, several days one below the other.
• Week — in wide frames, seven days from today side by side, multi-day events as a band.
• Today and Next event — the current or next event large with the time until then, beside or below it the ones that follow.
• Bar — in flat bands, Now and After that in one line.

If a list doesn’t fit, it turns calmly to the next page every ten seconds instead of shrinking the type.

Two examples: A medical practice shows the Day list with Busy only in its waiting area. Patients see how full the day is, but no names. A club sets up the Week with the booking times of its rooms in the foyer.

Add a calendar#

This is the way for the origin Calendar subscription. The quickest way is in the widget itself: Under Source, you find Add calendar. Enter a name and the address. When you leave the address field or click Check, the platform fetches the calendar once and tells you what it finds, such as There is a calendar “Events” at this address and 12 events in the next few weeks. If no name is entered yet, the form takes the name of the calendar. After Add calendar, the new calendar is chosen in the widget.

All calendars of your organization are listed on the app’s page, in the Calendars data area. There you rename a calendar, replace its address, or delete it. The address appears there only shortened, such as calendar.google.com/…/basic.ics. To change it, enter it again. An empty address field keeps the current one.

You find the ICS address in the sharing settings of the calendar: at Google under Secret address in iCal format, at Outlook under Publish calendar as ICS link, at iCloud under Public Calendar. An address starting with webcal:// works too.

Use a calendar from Outlook or Google#

The events of a Microsoft 365 or Google calendar reach the widget through a data source.

1. Have an Owner connect Microsoft 365 or Google under Settings › Organization › Connections, with Calendars checked (Connect Microsoft 365, Google, or Grafana).
2. Under Data sources, use Create source to create the Outlook calendar or the Google Calendar and choose the Calendar (Create a data source and show it in a widget).
3. In the widget, set the Origin under Source in the Data tab to Microsoft or Google and choose your Calendar.

The source delivers the events from yesterday to eight days ahead, with title, time, and location. Description, attendees, and attachments never arrive. Canceled events are left out. Events marked private or confidential arrive without title and location and always show as Busy. You set the interval at the source.

Settings#

Open the settings with the gear icon on the toolbar above the widget. They are on the tabs Content, Appearance, and Data. The editor hides fields that have no effect in the chosen view, and their value is kept. The toolbar also offers Template and Colors, plus View and Background.

Busy only already takes effect on our side: Titles and locations then never reach the display and are not in its cached state either.

Limits#

• Read-only, never write. The app does not create, change, or delete events. A calendar subscription needs no account and grants no sharing. Szenera reads Outlook and Google through a connection, also read-only.
• Only calendar subscription addresses with https. A calendar that offers no such address can be included only through Outlook or Google, if it lives there. The app does not accept addresses with a user name and password.
• At most 20 calendar subscriptions per organization.
• A little over two weeks ahead for a calendar subscription, eight days for Outlook and Google. Ongoing events stay, expired ones drop out.
• No description texts. Only the title, time, and location are transmitted, nothing more. This way, credentials from an event description never end up on a display.
• Time zones, pragmatically. Common zone names, the names Outlook uses, and custom zones defined in Outlook are understood. If the calendar subscription carries an unknown name, those events appear shifted by the offset, and the check reports that name.
• Calendar subscriptions are fetched every 15 minutes. The interval is fixed. All widgets of the same calendar share one fetch. For Outlook and Google, you set the interval at the source: every 5 min, every 15 min, or hourly.
• We handle the fetching, not the display. At most 4 MiB per fetch and a twelve-second timeout.

If something goes wrong#

Related#

• Configure widgets: template, preview, and fields
• Find the right app — categories, collections, and filters in the store.
• Show content at specific times — where the time zone of the organization comes from.