Have you been inviting everyone on your team to your vacation events, flooding everyone’s inbox with every little change you make? This can crowd everyone’s calendars and can cause confusion as it looks like everyone invited to the event is on vacation.

There is another way to achieve that shared team visibility with less chance of confusion. It will keep everyone in sync with your personal events that they need to be aware of without all the congestion. When you make changes to the event it will be visible to everyone who needs to know without constantly sending them notifications.

Here’s how.

Overview

1. Create a new secondary calendar
2. Add this new calendar as a contact in your address book
3. Share this contact with the rest of your team
4. Invite this contact, instead of each member of your team to your event

Step-by-step

1. Create a new secondary calendar

• In calendar, click on the drop-down to the right of My calendars, then click Create new calendar
• Name the calendar whatever is appropriate, Shared with Team, in this example
  
• In the section Shared with specific people, best practice if you have a large team would be to have your team as members of a Google Group, so you can just share with that group. Or you can share to each individual person by their email address.
• Once you have created the calendar, it is important to check this setting. By default, it should be set to Automatically add all invitations to this calendar
  

2. Add this new calendar as a contact in your address book

• After you have created the calendar, you will need to go back to its settings to get one piece of information – the Calendar ID – which looks something like: domain_name.com_numbers_and_letters@group.calendar.google.com
  
• Copy this calendar ID
• Go to your Contacts address book from within Gmail (top-left of screen in Gmail)
• Create a New Contact, name it the same as the calendar for consistency and add the calendar ID as its email address.

3. Share this contact with the rest of your team

• Method 1: Send everyone the calendar ID and instruct them repeat the 2nd and 3rd steps from #2 above
• Method 2: Use BetterCloud’s Contact Management to create and share the contact to a Google Group (of your team members) by tagging it.

4. Invite this contact, instead of each member of your team to your event

And boom, now my event (a vacation) can be kept in sync all from your own personal calendar as long as you have invited the Shared with Team contact as a guest.

By sharing the new calendar with your team (from #1) they will be able to see your vacation as it appears on the Shared with Team calendar (shown in yellow below)