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 Google or Outlook account, and it never adds, edits, or deletes anything on your personal calendar.

1. Where to Find Calendar Settings

Open your Utilization Calendar and choose Calendar settings. Everything below lives in that panel.

Calendar links are managed here. The Connectors tab covers Slack and Frame.io.

2. Publishing Your ABRAM Calendar

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

1. Open Calendar settings.
2. Turn on Publish my ABRAM calendar.
3. Click Copy calendar link.
4. In your own calendar app, add a subscribed calendar and paste the link.

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. If you need to invalidate it, use the revoke option in Calendar settings — the old link stops working immediately, and you can generate a fresh one.

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 label this a secret address in iCal format, and it starts with https:// or webcal://.
2. Open Calendar settings in ABRAM.
3. Under Subscribed calendars, paste the address and give it a label, such as Personal Google Calendar.
4. Save it.

To pull the latest events at any time, click Refresh subscribed calendars.

You can hide a subscribed calendar without removing it. A hidden calendar shows no events and raises no warnings.

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 Utilization Calendar alongside your ABRAM bookings.
• Raise a conflict warning when they overlap a booking or a hold.

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.
• AI matchmaking. The engine works from your ABRAM availability, so a subscribed event never removes you from consideration for a project.

All-day events from a subscribed calendar are skipped entirely, which stops a birthday or a public holiday from raising a warning against 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 genuinely unavailable, add a blockout on your Utilization Calendar. Section 4.4 covers that.

5. Privacy

Your subscribed calendars are visible to you alone. Producers, managers, and the AI matchmaking engine cannot see them, cannot see the events on them, and are not shown the warnings they generate.

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 a blockout.

6. Troubleshooting

Events from a subscribed calendar are not appearing. Click Refresh subscribed calendars. If the calendar is still empty, check that it is not hidden, then re-copy the secret address from your calendar app — some apps reissue the address when you reset sharing settings, which leaves the old one dead.

An all-day event is missing. This is deliberate. All-day events from subscribed calendars are skipped. See section 4.

Your published link stopped working in your calendar app. The link was most likely revoked. Open Calendar settings, generate a new link, and re-subscribe with it 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 a blockout on your Utilization Calendar to make the date genuinely unavailable.