We would love to see a native integration between Google Calendar and the Populi Calendar that allows a designated Google Calendar to serve as the primary scheduling calendar while automatically syncing with the Populi public calendar.
Our institution uses Google Calendar as our master calendar because it’s easier for multiple staff members to manage, collaborate on, and share. We also have an administrative need to maintain Google Calendar for payroll purposes and historical recordkeeping. However, we still have to manually recreate every event in Populi so students can view the schedule through the Populi portal.
Maintaining two separate calendars creates unnecessary duplicate work and increases the chance of mistakes. It’s easy for one calendar to be updated while the other is overlooked. Anytime a class date, module weekend, room assignment, event description, or meeting time changes, staff have to remember to update both Google Calendar and Populi separately.
Ideally, we’d like Populi to support a live Google Calendar integration that would:
* Allow a Google Calendar to be linked to the institutional Populi calendar.
* Automatically create new events in Populi whenever they’re added to Google Calendar.
* Automatically update events in Populi whenever they’re changed in Google Calendar, including the title, date, time, location, description, or other event details.
* Automatically remove or cancel events in Populi if they’re deleted from Google Calendar.
The goal is for Google Calendar to become the single source of truth, with Populi automatically reflecting those changes, similar to how Google Calendar integrates with many other platforms.
As an accredited institution of higher education, our calendar is constantly evolving throughout the year as module weekends, clinic schedules, academic events, holidays, and classroom assignments change. Google Calendar has become our primary scheduling tool because it fits seamlessly into our daily workflows and is shared across multiple administrators.
Having this integration would allow staff to maintain just one calendar while ensuring students always see the most current information in Populi. It would save time, reduce administrative work, minimize scheduling errors, and provide a much better experience for everyone who relies on the Populi calendar.