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Need an exorcist for Google Calendars!
Hawkeye1709
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Last time I posted a technical help topic it was either too specific or a dumb question (maybe both, hah!). I'm not sure which but I didn't get any answers. I'm hoping this is a better question or that someone here might be familiar enough with Google Calendars to help me out.
My google-fu is weak because initial searching does not return anything even remotely related to the problem. I am a scheduler for a research laboratory and I manage the schedules for about 14 people and co-ordinate when people can meet each other, training sessions, running participants etc. Google Calendars was selected as the means to keep track of schedules. I am liking it less and less but this is not my choice. I have to make Google Calendars work as best I can.
The problem is that Google Calendars is possessed by the devil. It started easily enough. I set up a schedule for everyone under my supervisor's account and then I collected availability times from everyone and inputted them into Google Calendars. These calendars were then shared with myself so I could manage the schedules from home. My supervisor can change them and manage sharing (to the best of my knowledge he has not run into any problems with glitching yet). I can only change them, not share them with anyone.
This system worked, no glitches when just my boss and I could see the schedules. But new standards were imposed in the lab and now everyone in the lab has to log their hours on Google Calendar. This necessitated sharing the calendars with the actual people they corresponded to. I went in and added them under my boss's account and the fun began. Most people couldn't access their own calendars and that was the first problem. Some people had no problem but they were (still are) in the minority. This wasn't a huge a concern for me because they could e-mail me their hours and I could input the hours in for them. But it seems that the problem is spreading. My initial thought was to just delete their permission and re-add them because this seems to fix the problem most of the time.
Since implementing this strategy I have been playing whack-a-mole. I will go to bed being able to see everyone's schedule. When I wake up in the morning I will not be able to see half the schedules anymore. I will see their name and be able to click it to bring a schedule up but then it will be blank, as if there are no scheduled events.
When I went in to try to fix this under my supervisor's account I noticed that my e-mail address had been replaced with a random string of characters: dXdjkj3323kjis or something along those lines. I delete the permission and re-add my e-mail address and things are fine. Next day it is attack of the random characters again. WTF?
I'm kind of reaching the end of my rope because I don't want to keep bothering my supervisor over what should be such a simple, worry-free process. I can't keep fixing them myself because I need to get into my supervisor's account to update the sharing. Now I can't even do the basic functions of my job of coordinating people's schedules because I can't see more than half of the schedules at any given point in time. I'm thinking I'm going to start searching around for something else I can use for myself to schedule activities but it is going to be difficult. When Google works it is excellent. Problem is that it hasn't been rendered ineffectual since we've tried having each schedule shared with three people instead of two.
My google-fu is weak because initial searching does not return anything even remotely related to the problem. I am a scheduler for a research laboratory and I manage the schedules for about 14 people and co-ordinate when people can meet each other, training sessions, running participants etc. Google Calendars was selected as the means to keep track of schedules. I am liking it less and less but this is not my choice. I have to make Google Calendars work as best I can.
The problem is that Google Calendars is possessed by the devil. It started easily enough. I set up a schedule for everyone under my supervisor's account and then I collected availability times from everyone and inputted them into Google Calendars. These calendars were then shared with myself so I could manage the schedules from home. My supervisor can change them and manage sharing (to the best of my knowledge he has not run into any problems with glitching yet). I can only change them, not share them with anyone.
This system worked, no glitches when just my boss and I could see the schedules. But new standards were imposed in the lab and now everyone in the lab has to log their hours on Google Calendar. This necessitated sharing the calendars with the actual people they corresponded to. I went in and added them under my boss's account and the fun began. Most people couldn't access their own calendars and that was the first problem. Some people had no problem but they were (still are) in the minority. This wasn't a huge a concern for me because they could e-mail me their hours and I could input the hours in for them. But it seems that the problem is spreading. My initial thought was to just delete their permission and re-add them because this seems to fix the problem most of the time.
Since implementing this strategy I have been playing whack-a-mole. I will go to bed being able to see everyone's schedule. When I wake up in the morning I will not be able to see half the schedules anymore. I will see their name and be able to click it to bring a schedule up but then it will be blank, as if there are no scheduled events.
When I went in to try to fix this under my supervisor's account I noticed that my e-mail address had been replaced with a random string of characters: dXdjkj3323kjis or something along those lines. I delete the permission and re-add my e-mail address and things are fine. Next day it is attack of the random characters again. WTF?
I'm kind of reaching the end of my rope because I don't want to keep bothering my supervisor over what should be such a simple, worry-free process. I can't keep fixing them myself because I need to get into my supervisor's account to update the sharing. Now I can't even do the basic functions of my job of coordinating people's schedules because I can't see more than half of the schedules at any given point in time. I'm thinking I'm going to start searching around for something else I can use for myself to schedule activities but it is going to be difficult. When Google works it is excellent. Problem is that it hasn't been rendered ineffectual since we've tried having each schedule shared with three people instead of two.
TLDR: Need to use Google Calendar to manage schedules for 14 people. Worked fine when each schedule was just shared between my supervisor and me. Has been glitching unsystematically and non-stop since updated regulations have required that the calendars be shared among three people (supervisor/myself/person the schedule is for).
If you have any idea how to fix this or if someone with more advanced Google-fu than myself could spare a minute to see if they can find something that might address this that would be great.
Thanks!
Hawkeye1709 on
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