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Allow SM calendars to be placed onto websites easily
Idea shared by echoDreamz - 1/10/2019 at 10:28 PM
Completed
Gmail has a nice feature were you can easily copy/paste HTML to your website to show a calendar, would be great of SM had this capability. We have tons of clients wanting to ditch gmail, but keep it simply because they need the calendar feature. Leagues, bands, school districts etc. that would appreciate this.

We have a quite a few clients who use Wordpress that have plugins that accept a URL-based ICS file, would make their lives easier too if SmarterMail generated an ICS file through a URL.

25 Replies

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1
Great Idea!  +1 here!
0
Even though the majority of our users would probably never utilize such a feature there are at least half-dozen I know off-hand that most certainly would. It seems a little crazy to tell those few people that they have to use a GMail/GSuite calendar with their WordPress instead of being able to just use their SmarterMail calendar.

(In the very least it takes away one more reason for a client to use a competitor's product and eventually switching to them instead of staying with SM.)

+1 to this feature suggestion
1
Yeah, all the clients asking for this are not pro developers, they barely know how to spell HTML, let alone write an entire integration into the SmarterMail service for their calendar or pay for someone who can. However, copy pasting in some code is super easy, copy pasting a URL into a plugin textbox and pressing save, no problem.

We've lost clients to Gmail because SmarterMail cannot be a full replacement. This would help pull some clients from Gmail into SM if they can do everything directly with SmarterMail.
0
Wow, great idea! +1 +1 +1!

This would also lessen the load on the server as certain shared resources are mapped to all users just so they can see the planning for that resource. But if we can publish this on a website, most would not need to map the calendars - just take a look at that page when needed.
0
sign me up
3
Employee Replied
8/28/2019 at 10:56 AM
Employee Post
echoDreamz,

Thank you for the suggestion!  I've submitted this as a feature request for you.
0
Any traction on this idea?
0
Great idea
0
Zach Sylvester Replied
2/16/2022 at 3:53 PM
Employee Post
Hello, 

No news on this currently. However, as a workaround, you could use this plugin with WordPress. 
This plugin uses CalDAV which is already implemented into SmarterMail to share a calendar on a website. I haven't tested this so I'm not sure how well it works. But just a suggestion! 

Kind Regards, 
Zach Sylvester Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
0
Zach,

Yes, that plugin works great for WordPress :)
2
Any ETA on this feature, I proposed this a few years back and was declined. Go Echo!
J. Sebastian Lee Service2Client LLC 6333 E Mockingbird Ste 147 Dallas, TX 75214 - 877.251.3273
2
Yeah, this is still something we'd really like to have. While the WordPress plugin works great, not everyone uses WordPress.
0
Agreed ...  we haven been waiting for this for a real long time.. and we use *.php;  and all flavors of Visual Studio - word press - help, but certainly doesn't cover more than 50% of the websites that we managed.
2
Any progress on this feature?
J. Sebastian Lee Service2Client LLC 6333 E Mockingbird Ste 147 Dallas, TX 75214 - 877.251.3273
0
Matt Petty Replied
9/15/2022 at 12:09 PM
Employee Post
This topic came up in a meeting we had yesterday. At first we were thinking this request was asking for a web-based calendar that people could embed or iframe onto their site. Unfortunately this would be really complicated for us to do right. After shooting this idea down we realized that the public "webcal" feature we have should satisfy the request for a publicly accessable ICS file containing all the events.

Try this.
-Go to your calendar section, click on the calendar name to bring up settings
-Enable "Allow others to subscribe to this calendar"
-Copy the URL and change the webcal:// to https://
-Insert this url into plugins that accept ICS, you can also put the url in your browser and download the ics file to inspect yourself.

I tested this with some clients real quick and it seems like this would work, however I did not try any real-world scenarios like wordpress plugins.

Lemme know if this works out for you, hopefully it does. We did shoot the idea of a js/html/iframe based calendar down, too complicated. However I'll go ahead and mark this thread as "Completed", if you experience issues using this URL we can look a bit more into it.
Matt Petty Senior Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
1
Yeah, the embedded Calander (js/html/iframe) is what our customers are looking for.
1
Matt Petty Replied
9/15/2022 at 1:03 PM
Employee Post
I messed around with this a bit...
I actually have a quick example less than 30 lines that can demonstate fullcalendar's ability to display a calendar via ics link.

Just copy this into a new "test.html" file and open it in your browser.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang='en'>
 <head>
  <meta charset='utf-8' />
  <link href='https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/fullcalendar@5.11.3/main.min.css'; rel='stylesheet' />
  <script src='https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/fullcalendar@5.11.3/main.min.js'></script>;
  <script src='https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/ical.js@1.5.0/build/ical.min.js'></script>;
  <script src='https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@fullcalendar/icalendar@5.11.3/main.global.min.js'></script>;
 </head>
 <body>
  <div id='calendar'></div>
  <script>
   document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function() {
    var calendarEl = document.getElementById('calendar');
    var calendar = new FullCalendar.Calendar(calendarEl, {
     initialView: 'dayGridMonth',
     events: {
      url: 'https://mail.smartertools.com:443/webcal/ZDgwY2NiZjg4MjM5NDY4OTk3NDg2YjA5ODhmZjA2OWN8YmI1OWVlM2NjNmRjNDlhMThiOTQxZjQ3YmQ1NGY0Y2N8OTQwMTA5';,
      format: 'ics'
     }
    });
    calendar.render();
   });
  </script>
 </body>
</html>
Matt Petty Senior Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
2
There was a second component to this request. 

The ability to have a web calendar where clients could schedule a Video chat via Team Workspace. 
J. Sebastian Lee Service2Client LLC 6333 E Mockingbird Ste 147 Dallas, TX 75214 - 877.251.3273
0
That is actually not too bad... Let me get with one of our customers really wanting this to see if this is a solution for them. Bit more than Google's single iFrame line, but this is workable.

Thanks Matt!
0
Zach Sylvester Replied
9/15/2022 at 3:34 PM
Employee Post
Hey J Lee, 

Thanks for following up. That kinda thing seems like it would be a whole other application. You could use the API and create calendar meetings and team workspaces via an external web interface. I did something kinda similar here https://github.com/zjs81/SMResender-Tool this tool resends detected viruses via the eml name and is hosted on its own web server. It would be the same kinda concept you just pass in creds to the server and create the appointments using the API and some parameters. 

Kind Regards, 

 
 
Zach Sylvester Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
0
The cnd links are saying the file can not be found. 
J. Sebastian Lee Service2Client LLC 6333 E Mockingbird Ste 147 Dallas, TX 75214 - 877.251.3273
0
J. Sebastian Lee Service2Client LLC 6333 E Mockingbird Ste 147 Dallas, TX 75214 - 877.251.3273
0
Zach Sylvester Replied
9/19/2022 at 11:31 AM
Employee Post
Hey J Lee,

It's strange that you're having issues with the CDN I just took a look at the links and they appear to be working. Please see below. 


I took a look at the script it works perfectly fine. The error is just stating that it can't find the source map which doesn't cause an issue with anything else. It looks like our code editor in SmarterTrack might be adding some semicolons. Which is strange.  
I changed the code to show one of my test calendars. 
Please try the following code. 
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang='en'>
 <head>
  <meta charset='utf-8' />
  <link href='https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/fullcalendar@5.11.3/main.min.css' rel='stylesheet' />
  <script src='https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/fullcalendar@5.11.3/main.min.js'></script>;;;
  <script src='https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/ical.js@1.5.0/build/ical.min.js'></script>;;;
  <script src='https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@fullcalendar/icalendar@5.11.3/main.global.min.js'></script>;
 </head>
 <body>
  <div id='calendar'></div>
  <script>
   document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function() {
    var calendarEl = document.getElementById('calendar');
    var calendar = new FullCalendar.Calendar(calendarEl, {
     initialView: 'dayGridMonth',
     events: {
      url: 'https://mail.smartermonitor.com/webcal/NjA5OTljNWU3YWZiNGVhZWFlMjE4MWQ2OGYwMTRkMDF8NTQ5ODAzMTNlOTU1NDdhYzg5YTBiNDBhMGNkYTIwNDR8NTAwMDM=',
      format: 'ics'
     }
    });
    calendar.render();
   });
  </script>
 </body>
</html>
Kind Regards, 
Zach Sylvester Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
0
Hi Zach
That is strange, maybe a unicode thing. 

So I have the code working, but the calendar is not editable. When Matt said FullCalendar ability he did not mean full permission?

Matt
"I actually have a quick example less than 30 lines that can demonstate fullcalendar's ability to display a calendar via ics link."
J. Sebastian Lee Service2Client LLC 6333 E Mockingbird Ste 147 Dallas, TX 75214 - 877.251.3273
0
Zach Sylvester Replied
9/19/2022 at 1:02 PM
Employee Post
Hey J Lee, 

Thanks for the question. Full calendar is the name of the Javascript library that he was using. 
webcal uses the Get method, not the post so there wouldn't be a way to add appointments. But if you did some more work with this you could make something similar to harmonizly, Using the API. I actually recommend that you look into harmonizly. We use this for scheduling screen shares etc. 

Kind Regards, 
Zach Sylvester Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
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