I am the college helpdesk administrator over our Google Apps services to 1000+ students each year.

We have successfully launched calendars in a different way than what you described. 

I created a user account called Central Calendar,  (Central is the name of our school).  In this account I used the main calendar in the account as the public calendar that allowed users outside our domain to view content.  (We also host the html code for the “Central Calendar” on a page of our public site so non-Google users and visitors to our web site can see the calendar and events). 

In this same calendar account I then added sub calendars by department and or event/activity for our student body.  Sports Team, Academics, Admissions, Student Body/Activities… These calendars are not public, yet shared only with our domain users.  This allows only members with our .domainname to view them, but more importantly we wanted to automatically drive the calendars to the users of our domain. 

In this last function I had to come up with a work around.  The API to add a user to a privet calendar only allows you to add one name at a time… so I tried typing two names at once but it adds the name once I add the space after the full email address of the first name.  Then I tried exporting all email addresses into a csv format.  I did this with a different application.  When I pasted the full list of csv, (emails only), into the one field name and cIicked on add name, it created a listing for each individual email address AND associated the correct user name to its corresponding email address.  Those addresses that were not Google accounts were sent an invitation to be added to the calendar.

The last kind of calendar we created was completely private, such as for our staff and faculty.  This calendar was then shared by user name only using the above method as well.   

These calendars are managed by staff members with user accounts that are setup as able to change settings to the calendar they are responsible for.  When a change is made only those domain users and accounts invited see the calendar forced to display on the left side of the calendar page and the content of the events.

I’m interested in other ways you may have found in dynamically using the functionality.

David Rosado

HelpDesk@cccb.edu

Help Desk Administrator