Connecting calendars

Calemander uses your calendar twice: it reads it to find out when you are busy, and it writes the booking to it so the meeting shows up for you and lands in your invitee's inbox. You can connect Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, and a CalDAV calendar such as iCloud or Fastmail.

Connecting

Everything on this page lives under Calendars in the dashboard sidebar, on the page headed Calendar Settings.

• Google Calendar — in the Calendars & Conferencing card, click Connect next to Google Calendar and approve the request from Google.
• Outlook Calendar — click Connect next to Outlook Calendar and sign in with your Microsoft account.
• Apple iCloud / CalDAV — its own card lower down. Choose Apple iCloud, Fastmail or Other server, enter your username and an app-specific password, and click Connect. For Other server you also supply the server URL, which must start with https://. Use an app-specific password, not your account password. If your account has more than one calendar, you pick which one to use straight after connecting.

You can connect one account per provider. Connecting a second Google or Outlook account replaces the first. If a provider shows Not configured, that integration has not been set up on your Calemander deployment and there is nothing you can do from this page.

What Calemander reads

Connected calendars are always checked for conflicts — there is no switch that turns conflict checking off. What you can choose is which calendars are consulted.

• Check availability from picks between your connected providers: Google Calendar only, Outlook Calendar only, or Both calendars when you have both. An event type can override this under its Location section, with Override global calendar settings for this event type.
• Google calendars to check lists every Google calendar you can see free/busy for, with a checkbox each. All of them are checked until you narrow the list.
• For Outlook, your default calendar is the one consulted; there is no per-calendar selection.
• A connected CalDAV calendar is always checked, whatever Check availability from is set to. All-day events on it count as busy for the whole day. Events marked transparent (“free”) or cancelled do not.

Google and Outlook are asked only for when you are busy, never for what the meetings are. A CalDAV server has no equivalent query, so it returns whole events and Calemander reads nothing from them but the start, end and whether they count as busy. On Outlook, events marked busy or tentative block a slot; events marked free, out of office or working elsewhere do not.

If a calendar provider cannot be reached, your booking page shows an error instead of offering times. That is deliberate: showing every slot as free because we could not check would double-book you.

What Calemander writes

Calendar invite via chooses which calendar the booking is created on: Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar or No calendar event. That invite is what emails the meeting to your invitee. An event type can override this too, under Location.

On Google, the event is created on your primary calendar. If you have a CalDAV calendar connected, a copy of the booking is mirrored into it as well, regardless of which provider sends the invite — that copy has no attendees and carries the join link in its description.

When a booking changes, so does the calendar:

• Rescheduled — a Google event is moved to the new time and your invitee gets the update. The exception is Google Meet: because the Meet link belongs to the event, the old event is cancelled and a new one created, so the join link changes. An Outlook event is always cancelled and recreated at the new time.
• Cancelled — the calendar event is cancelled and the CalDAV copy removed.

If a calendar write fails, the booking itself still stands. Calemander would rather have a confirmed booking missing from a calendar than lose the booking.

Disconnecting

Each connected provider has a Disconnect button and a confirmation step. After disconnecting, that calendar's events no longer block your availability and new bookings are not added to it. Events already on the calendar stay exactly where they are.

Google has a Reconnect button for the case where the connection has quietly gone stale — the row still says connected but the booking page reports that the calendar is unavailable. Reconnecting refreshes the authorisation without changing any of your settings. For Outlook and CalDAV, disconnect and connect again to achieve the same thing.

Related

• Conferencing — where the meeting itself happens.
• Availability — the hours your calendar is checked within.

Last checked 2026-08-29.