Use cases → Scheduling
Synchronise out-of-office status across calendars
Mirror out-of-office status between multiple Google Workspace calendars so colleagues always see accurate availability.
| Who it is for | IT teams managing cross-tenant or multi-calendar resource scheduling. |
|---|---|
| APIs | Calendar API |
| Typical scopes | calendar, calendar.settings.readonly |
The problem
Staff with multiple calendars—especially in cross-domain or delegated setups—often have their out-of-office (OOO) status set only on one, leaving others to show them as available. This leads to double bookings and confusion when colleagues or automated schedulers do not see the true state.
How it works
- Use a service account with domain-wide delegation to poll users' primary calendar for OOO events.
- Read the Calendar API's 'outOfOffice' event type and current 'autoDecline' settings.
- Write a matching OOO event to the target calendar, preserving details and time ranges.
- Update or remove the mirror event if the source status changes.
- Log and verify the synchronisation by checking event IDs and statuses after each operation.
What changes
All relevant calendars reflect the user's correct out-of-office periods, reducing booking conflicts and mistaken availability.
Questions people ask
How do I avoid duplicate out-of-office events?
Store the event ID or use a custom tag in the description when writing mirror events, and check for existing ones before creating new entries.
How quickly does status propagate across calendars?
There can be a 2–5 minute delay from when an OOO event is created to when it is visible via the API, so design the synchroniser with retries and backoff.
Want this built?
This is a pattern we run in production. We will set up the delegation and build this on top of it — $500 per hour, most of it working the same day.
Talk to us Or read the setup guideRelated use cases
Build a real picture of team availability
Read calendars across the domain to answer who is free, who is overloaded and where the week actually went.
Turn a finished meeting into follow-up automatically
Detect that a meeting happened, pull the notes, and draft the follow-up before anyone opens their laptop.
Turn a booking into a record everywhere it matters
When a meeting is booked, create the record, the folder and the confirmation in one pass.