With Teamup, calendar access for every user is centrally controlled by the calendar administrator. Think of an office building: the organization which owns the building has full control of who can access the building. With a Teamup calendar, the organization has full control of user access to the calendar. The original calendar administrator is the individual who created the calendar, but the administrator role can be transferred to other authorized individual(s). The permissions for every calendar user or shareable link can be customized and managed.
Table of Contents
- Calendars and office buildings: an analogy
- Personalized ID badges and transferable keys
- Choosing sub-calendars and permissions
- Managing users and calendar links
Calendars and office buildings: an analogy
Think of your master calendar as an office building, and the sub-calendars are the rooms and shared spaces. The administrator controls the access to the building. If you are the administrator, you give each of your employees a key and let them in.
A Teamup master calendar is like the whole building with many offices. Each sub-calendar is like one office. When multiple sub-calendars are organized in a folder, that’s like a floor with multiple offices. A Teamup master calendar may have multiple folders, like an office building may have many floors.
When you make someone a calendar user, you are giving that user access to the calendar. That’s like giving an employee a key they can use to enter the office building.
You can give a key that opens one office (sub-calendar), or several offices (sub-calendars), or all of the offices (sub-calendars) in the building. And, if needed, you can change the lock so the key no longer works.
Each key also comes with a set of permissions. One key might allow an employee to enter multiple offices, just to look around. Another key might allow a whole group to come in and rearrange things to suit what they’re doing. If you designate an office to one employee and label the office (a sub-calendar) with that employee’s name, you still need to give the employee a key to enter the office. The key may have the same name as the office name. For a typical Team Calendars, you may assign the Modify permission to allow the employee to change anything in his or her office, while read-only or no access to the offices of other people or some restricted areas.
Certain calendar features and benefits (such as a calendar dashboard synced across multiple devices) are free to all but require account-based access.
Personalized ID badges and sharable keys
With a Teamup calendar, you can share your calendar securely with account-based access or via shareable links.
- Account-based access (users and groups) requires the user to login with their email address and provides a greater level of security and control.
- On the other hand, shareable links are preferred in some situations because they are simple for anyone to access the calendar without any user account or login.
Account-based access means the user must log into their Teamup user account to access the calendar. Each user account is tied to a specific user’s email address. The user is like an employee who is given a personalized ID badge to access the office building with permissions set for which offices and areas he is granted access to. The employee wears the badge inside the building. If he makes any change in any offices, it is tracked that he made the change.
If a user is given access via a sharable calendar link, it is like the employee is given a conventional key. Similar to the account-based access, it can be set to access the offices with customized permissions. However, it is not personal. It is only identifiable by the name of the link which can be the name of the employee or a group of people. But the employee may give the key to others, or any individual of the group may use the same key to enter certain offices. When a change is made by someone who uses the link key to enter an office, all it can be tracked is the name of the link key, not the individual who uses the key.
For organizations where security is important, the account-based access is typically preferred. On the other hand, a big advantage of access via calendar links is the simplicity since no user account is required and no need to login. Read how to choose between account access or calendar link access.
Choosing sub-calendars and permissions
A user will only have access to the sub-calendars you include at the permissions you set for that user or shareable link. You might have a calendar with forty different sub-calendars; if you add a user or create a link that includes only one and share it with someone, they’ll only have access to the one sub-calendar you included.
You can choose to include all sub-calendars or select the calendars you want to include. If you include all sub-calendars, you can set permissions globally.
There are nine different levels of access permissions that you can assign to each of the sub-calendars for a shareable link.
- Administrator: Includes all permissions and is the only permission level allowing access to the Settings interface of the calendar. Use this permission with great care! Only check Yes if you want the user or link to include full administrative powers.
- Read-only: Can view calendar events, including details, but not make changes.
- Read-only, no details: Can view calendar with events marked as reserved time blocks, but no further event details included. Cannot make changes.
- Add-only: Can add new events; can read but not modify any existing events. Newly added events can be modified only during the current browser session (up to approximately 30 minutes).
- Add-only, no details: Same as Add-only but the details of any existing events are hidden (marked as reserved).
- Modify: Can add new events and modify or delete any existing events on the shared calendar.
- Modify-from-same-link: Can add new events and modify any existing events that are created via the same link, but can only read (not modify) any existing events created via other calendar links.
- Modify-from-same-link, no details: Can add new events and modify any existing events that are created via the same link, but the details of any events created by others will be hidden (marked as reserved).
- Not shared: the calendar is not included in the shareable link; it will not show in the list of sub-calendars on the sidebar.
Learn how to customize access permissions.
Managing users and calendar links
As a calendar administrator, you can edit users or links at any time: add, modify, or remove users, and create, modify, deactivate, or delete links.
Keep in mind there is a limit to the number of account users included in each subscription plan. For example, if you are using the free version, you can add up to 8 account users. You may add more users with a paid subscription plan.
Users and calendar links are always under the control of the calendar administrator. If you need to grant temporary access to your calendar, you can simply add a user or create a link. To prevent a former employee from access to the calendar, delete or deactivate their access as described here.
Learn how to better protect your calendar data.
Header image by Nastuh Abootalebi on Unsplash
