Section 4.5: External Calendars

ABRAM shares calendar information over two separate links, and you set each one up on its own.

You can publish your ABRAM schedule as a private link that any calendar app can subscribe to, and you can subscribe ABRAM to an outside calendar so its events appear alongside your bookings as clash warnings.

Both directions are read-only. ABRAM never signs in to your calendar account, and it never adds, edits or deletes anything on your personal calendar.

1. Where to Find Calendar Settings

Click Schedule in the sidebar, then click the gear (Calendar settings) in the calendar toolbar. Everything below lives in that window.

Calendar links are managed here, separately from Settings > Integrations > Connectors.

2. Publishing Your ABRAM Calendar

This puts your ABRAM bookings into the calendar app you already use.

1. Open Calendar settings.
2. Under Publish my calendar, click Create link.
3. Click the copy button next to the Subscription link.
4. In your own calendar app, add a subscribed calendar and paste the link. On a computer, Open in app opens your calendar app's subscribe dialog directly.

Your calendar app refreshes the link on its own schedule, so new bookings appear there within the app's normal refresh window.

[!IMPORTANT] The link is private, and anyone holding it can read your schedule. Treat it like a password. Click Regenerate to replace it with a new link, or Stop publishing to turn it off. The old link stops working straight away.

3. Subscribing ABRAM to an Outside Calendar

This brings your outside commitments into ABRAM as warnings.

1. In your own calendar app, find the private address for the calendar you want to share. Calendar apps usually call this the secret address in iCal format. It starts with https:// or webcal://.
2. Open Calendar settings in ABRAM.
3. Under Subscribed calendars, enter a Name, such as Personal calendar, and paste the address into Feed link.
4. Click Add calendar.

ABRAM syncs subscribed calendars on its own. To pull the latest events at any time, click the sync button on a calendar's row. The refresh button next to Subscribed calendars reloads the list.

Each calendar has a switch. Turn it off to hide the calendar without removing it. A hidden calendar shows no events and raises no warnings. To remove a calendar, click the remove button on its row.

4. What External Events Affect

This is the part worth reading closely, because subscribed events behave differently from bookings you accept in ABRAM.

What they do:

• Appear on your Schedule alongside your ABRAM bookings.
• Raise a conflict warning when a timed event overlaps one of your timed bookings or meetings.

What they leave alone:

• Your availability. A meeting on a subscribed calendar does not mark you unavailable.
• Your capacity and remaining hours. Subscribed events are excluded from those figures.
• Crew matching. Matching works from your ABRAM availability, so a subscribed event never removes you from consideration for a project.

All-day events from a subscribed calendar show on your Schedule and never raise a warning. That stops a birthday or a public holiday from flagging a full shoot day.

The reasoning is the same one behind time off: an outside commitment is worth flagging to you, and only you can say whether it actually blocks the work. To make yourself unavailable, add Time off on your Schedule. Section 4.4 covers that.

5. Privacy

Your subscribed calendars are visible to you alone. Producers, managers and crew matching cannot see them or the events on them, and nobody else is shown the warnings they raise.

This means an outside commitment stays private, and it also means nobody else is told why a date looks busy to you. If you want a date to read as unavailable to the people booking you, add Time off.

6. Troubleshooting

Events from a subscribed calendar are not appearing. Click the sync button on the calendar's row. If the calendar is still empty, check that its switch is on, then copy the secret address from your calendar app again. Some apps issue a new address when you reset sharing settings, and the old one stops working.

An all-day event raised no warning. All-day events from subscribed calendars never raise warnings. See part 4.

Your published link stopped working in your calendar app. The link was most likely regenerated or stopped. Open Calendar settings, copy the current link (or click Create link), and subscribe with it again in your calendar app.

A date shows a warning but you are still being booked. Warnings from subscribed calendars do not block a booking. Add Time off on your Schedule to make the date unavailable.