November 2016 - Teamup Calendar News, Tips, and Stories

Five tips to plan your way to a stress free Christmas

While Andy Williams may have thought it was the most wonderful time of the year, for a lot of people Christmas causes no end of stress. But it doesn’t have to. With a little forward planning, clever calandars, and our quick tips, you’ll be well on your way your most relaxed Christmas yet!

1. Start early and plan ahead

Although you don’t need to plan with military precision (“everyone must be seated by 1500 hours!”), it’s a good idea to write down a basic plan by mid-November. Think about presents, shopping, food, decorations, travel arrangements, and seating plans. Use online planning apps such as Trello, Wunderlist, and Teamup to speed up the process. And don’t forget to delegate!

2. Make a do to list (and then cut it in half)

Do you really need to spend six hours decorating presents with individually crafted bows? Go through your to do list and ask yourself “if I don’t do this, what will happen?” Don’t make more work for yourself than is absolutely necessary. Be satisfied with “good enough”.

3. Use a group calendar to organize travel plans

Gone are the days of planning via multiple emails, phone calls, cross checking calendars, and post-it notes. Your Teamup calendar now integrates any calendar that has a feed in .ics format. That means if Uncle Jim has Google calendar, Joanne likes Outlook, and Julie uses Trello, all your travel plans can be in one place — a central Teamup calendar.

4. Tackle to-do lists together

If you find wrapping presents, writing cards or cooking a chore, why not invite your friends round to join you? After all, misery loves company!

5. Stick with your routine and remember to have fun

Remember, Christmas is supposed to be fun! Make sure you leave some time for yourself — it’s so easy to get caught up in all the chaos that you forget to do the things you enjoy. Factor your usual activities into your schedule so they don’t get lost in the winter whirlwind. Give yourself permission to forget the to-do list for a while and savour the moment.

What are your top tips for staying stress-free over the festive period? Are you a top planner? Can you share your secret? Let us know in the comments!

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Teamup is an online calendar built specifically for groups. Our simple and intuitive calendars help teams manage shared time and resources. With no account or login needed, it really is the simplest way to plan and share statuses around groups of all sizes.

How to have all your calendars in one place with no fuss

Teamup now integrates with any calendars that provide iCalendar feeds in the .ics format. Any new feed will be added as a read-only sub-calendar to your Teamup Calendar. It will inherit all Teamup features and functionality such as assigning individual access, etc. Click here to see a live demo.

This important feature opens up the possibility to be the go-to calendar to view schedules and plans in one place, regardless if they are administered by your group or just for-information-only events organized by someone else: Simply subscribe to the iCalendar feeds you need and you’ll have the all in one calendar view. No more re-creating events that are administered or updated elsewhere – the updates get automatically synchronized to your Teamup!

Continue reading How to have all your calendars in one place with no fuss

Using Trello with Teamup Calendar

If you use Teamup Calendar and Trello’s Calendar Power-up, you can now add all the due dates on any of your Trello boards to a Teamup Calendar, taking advantage of Teamup’s full calendar functionality for even better sharing and collaboration in teams.

Trello is a great project and workflow management tool. Just moving cards to different lists as the status of a task changes is so simple and effective. However, the Trello calendar component is somewhat limited even though it does display all due dates on one board in a calendar view. When you have multiple boards, you also have multiple calendars that do not overlay into one single view, leaving it difficult to see what’s coming up next week across all your boards.

This is where Teamup comes in. With Teamup’s support for inbound iCalendar feeds, the iCalendar feed of a Trello board can be easily added to a Teamup Calendar as a color-coded sub-calendar. Repeat for each board you want to be integrated into your Teamup Calendar. It is easy to zoom out to see the big picture of all due dates across the boards, or zoom in to examine the details of any specific deadline. You can change views, filter by board or keywords as needed. Check out this live demo.

The feeds would refresh between once per hour for Premium subscribers and once every 12 hours for free users.

Setting up the integration requires to get the feed URL from Trello and subscribe to the feed URL within Teamup.

Step 1: Get the Trello iCalendar feed URL

To begin, enable the iCalendar feed and find the iCalendar URL for your Trello board.

Open the board menu
Click “Power-Ups,”
Click “Calendar.” Enable the Power-Up if you haven’t already.
Then click the gear icon to see the “Calendar Settings”
Once there click “Enabled” to enable the iCalendar feed. If you don’t have this option, you’ll need to ask a board admin to enable this setting.
Copy the URL from “Your Personal iCalendar Feed.”

Step 2: Subscribe to the feed from Teamup

Set up the feed as a new sub-calendar:

Go to your Teamup Calendar. If you don’t have one yet, create a free calendar.
Go to Settings, click Calendars on the left.
Now click the blue button “New” in the top right and select “Add iCalendar feed”.
Enter a name that you wish the feed to appear in the calendar list, for example:
Trello > Editorial Calendar (see how to use folders)
Paste the feed URL you copied from Trello.
If your calendar is on a Premium subscription, you may choose to refresh as frequent as 1 hour. For free calendars, it will refresh every 12 hours.

Once you save, the initial fetch will happen immediately. Within a few seconds, all your Trello calendar entries should appear on your Teamup Calendar. The feed now is displayed in the calendar list as a sub-calendar. Click the image below to see a live demo.

From now on you can use your Trello calendar feed just like any other sub-calendars you created directly within Teamup Calendar. Please note: The subscribed calendars are read-only.

Ready to give it a try? It’s easy and free. We look forward to your feedback.

Android app now supports image uploading

Good news for users of our Android app: The latest version now supports image uploading directly from your mobile device. If your calendar has an active Premium subscription, you may use this feature in your event editor.

Once the uploading icon is tapped, you get to choose to upload from Gallery and select an image or upload directly from your device’s Camera. The inserted image would be initially displayed as the link address in the event editor, and will be changed to a clickable link once you have saved it.

Supported file sources for uploading are currently limited to Gallery and Camera. More sources will be supported in future updates.

Learn more.

How to Create Company Calendars

Most companies are organized in teams or departments that focus on specific areas of work, such as engineering, production, sales and finance. In small businesses, it is also common that some people wear multiple hats and work in more than one department. A company calendar structured according to the operation helps keep a clear overview of who is doing what or simply the availability of resources.

If you would like to create a company calendar where all employees can update their vacation plans and be scheduled for jobs, while everyone may or may not view the calendars of others, you’ve come to the right place: Teamup allows you to set up such a company calendar easily. The case below demonstrates how to set up the calendars and create access links for each employee and for managers to keep informed of what’s up for a whole department.

Case background:

The company has 25 employees. They are split within 2 departments:
Department 1: 16 employees
Department 2: 14 employees
There are 5 employees working in both departments.

The need as described by the manager who is looking for a solution:

“I would like to have the possibility to have 3 different type of views for the people in different roles in my company:

One view with ALL 25 individual calendars for the company owner and other key personnel.
One view for the manager of Department 1 which regroups 16 individual calendars; one view for the manager of Department 2 which regroups 14 individual calendars
One view for each individual employee so that people can look at their calendar only and update if needed.”

The solution with Teamup Calendar:

Step 1:

Add calendars for each employee. Use 3 folders to group them: one for those only working in Dept 1, one for those in Dept 2, and one for those working in both departments.

Step 2:

Besides the calendar administrator link that is shared with the Creator of the calendar, the administrator may create additional calendar links and assign them custom access permissions at any time: Each department link allows the user to view or modify respective staff’s calendars. And the administrator also creates one link for each employee to view or modify their own calendar only or additionally to view only but not modify any the calendars of others. See more about permissions and how to share.

View only individual employee who could update her own calendar — An employee or contractor is able to view and update her own calendar only but no access to the calendars of others.

company calendar linda modi — Individual employee is able to update her own calendar but view only calendars of others. Note no lock sign in frant of the calendar Linda.

Optionally, if the employee would like to read his or her calendar from their personal calendar, like Google Calendar or Outlook, they could subscribe to the iCalendar feed of their Teamup Calendar. To overcome delays of the refreshing frequency of the destination calendar, one may consider setting up email notifications so that you will be notified when changes occur on your Teamup Calendar.

Teamup can also be the destination calendar: One can pull in an external calendar like a Google Calendar to the Teamup Calendar by using our inbound iCalendar feeds functionality. Both options are one-way and read-only sync, meaning the subscribed calendars can not be edited on the destination calendar.

Teamup is flexible. If your needs are different from the case above. You can easily adapt your Teamup Calendar to what would work best for you. If you need help, check out the help resources or contact support@teamup.com.

How to add a holiday calendar to your Teamup

Including public holidays in a team calendar is a frequent need. Using the new inbound iCalendar feeds (beta), you can easily add a holiday calendar to your Teamup Calendar using any of the freely available public calendar feeds on the Internet.