A shared team calendar, run from Slack
- Trigger
- 📅:calendar:
- Lands in
- Google Calendar, echoed in Slack
- Setup
- 4 min
- Needs
- A Google account per member
Design review added to the team calendar
Thursday, 2:00 PM to 2:45 PM
- Created by
- @evelyn
- Guests
- 3 connected members
Everyone you invited was free at this slot, so Via booked it without another round of messages.
Connect your Google account
The team calendar is owned by Viably’s service account, while each member connects their own Google account for scheduling. That split keeps one canonical shared calendar while still reading each person’s real availability.
Viably maintains a single service-account-owned calendar for the whole team, so events live in one place rather than scattered across personal calendars.
Each member authorizes their Google account once from the /calendar connect prompt. That lets Via see free and busy for scheduling without anyone sharing calendars manually.
Connecting also subscribes you to the shared calendar, so the team's events show up next to yours on every device, and you can move one from Google as readily as from Slack. Viably reads your own calendars for free and busy only, and never writes to them.
Add a calendar reaction to a message and Viably offers to turn it into an event on the shared team calendar. Any of the calendar emoji work.
Run the /calendar command to see your agenda and create an event directly, without needing a source message.
Say “@Via find 30 minutes for the three of us this week” and Via checks free/busy across members to propose times that actually work.
One agenda for everything
/calendar covers more than Google events. It is a unified personal agenda that pulls together everything with a date attached, so you get a single place to see what is coming up.
Events on the shared team Google Calendar.
Your assigned tasks with due dates.
Tracked issues that have a date attached.
Scheduled reminders, mirrored from the Reminders power.
Turn on Mirror my reminders to the team calendar from the calendar settings and every reminder you set from then on also lands as an event on the shared calendar, de-duplicated in the agenda so it shows up once rather than twice. It stays off until you turn it on, and because the calendar is shared, the reminder text becomes an event title that every connected member can read. Switching it back off removes the ones still pending.
Meetings on the customer record
A call you booked with a customer is part of that relationship, and it can sit on their record beside the emails and the payments.
Most CRMs never learn that a meeting happened. Somebody enquires, a colleague books a call, and the record shows a form submission going quiet at exactly the point the relationship was at its healthiest. Viably closes that in two ways, and neither of them asks you to log anything by hand.
- Invite Viably to the meeting.Add your workspace’s shared address as a guest and the invitation your calendar sends carries everything the record needs. This route uses no calendar access at all, so it works for members who have never connected Google, and it works from Outlook and anything else that sends a standard invitation.
- Or switch on meeting logging. Under Powers, Calendar, the Log meetings with contacts toggle lets Viably read your own calendar and file the meetings that involve somebody your workspace already tracks. This covers the calls nobody thought to invite Viably to.
Meeting logging is per member and off until that member turns it on, which follows the same rule as reminder mirroring above and for the same reason. A calendar holds interviews, one to ones about other staff and medical appointments, so nobody should be able to switch it on for somebody else. Once it is on, Viably reads that calendar about once an hour, reaching back three months on the first pass so the meetings you have already held are there when you go looking.
An entry is written only for attendees who are already in your contacts, and a meeting involving nobody you track is read and discarded without a trace. Anyone who declined is left off, since a meeting on a record is read as evidence that person was in the room. A meeting that moves takes its entry with it, and a cancelled one takes its entry away. See One address for every customer record for the invitation route and the address it uses.
A shared team calendar that everybody schedules into from Slack. Each member connects their own Google account, so Viably acts as that person when they create an event rather than posting as a generic bot.
Yes. Ask it for a free slot and it checks across the connected members, which replaces the round of messages that usually settles a meeting time.
Google events, plus your Viably tasks, issues, and reminders, de-duplicated into one list. It is meant to answer what am I on the hook for today without opening four surfaces.
Only the people who want to create events as themselves or have their availability considered. Anybody can still read the shared agenda without connecting.
The shared team calendar is added to it, so the workspace's events appear alongside your own on every device. You get edit access to that shared calendar, which is what lets you move an event from Google rather than only from Slack. Your own calendars stay private and Viably never writes to them.
Everyone who has connected Google Calendar, because mirrored reminders are events on the shared team calendar and the reminder text becomes the event title. Mirroring is off by default for exactly that reason. Reminders you have not mirrored stay between you and the channel they fire in.
Yes, either by adding your workspace's shared address as a guest on the invite, which needs no calendar access at all, or by turning on Log meetings with contacts under Powers, Calendar. A meeting only ever attaches to somebody already in your contacts, and it can never create one, so an entry involving nobody you track is read and discarded without a trace.
No. The setting is per member and off until you turn it on yourself, and what it produces is an entry on a contact's timeline holding the title, the time and who was there. Meetings that involve nobody in your contacts are never recorded anywhere, so interviews, one to ones and personal appointments leave no trace in Viably.
It revokes Viably's access to your Google account, removes the shared team calendar from your calendar list, and takes your still-pending mirrored reminders off it. The events other people created stay where they are.
Connect your Google account from the calendar command, and the shared team calendar is yours on the free plan.
Add Viably to Slack