Prepare Google calendar to work with UnSpot

Before connecting UnSpot to your Google account you need to make sure that your meeting rooms are set up and managed in your Google Workspace Organization. UnSpot needs permission to view and modify the calendars paired with your account. Enabling the permissions outlined below within Google keeps your calendars in sync.

You'll need administrator access to your Google Workspace account in order to make some of these changes.

Setting up Google Workspace

The recommended way to do this is to set up each of your meeting rooms as a Resource. Resources added this way will appear under a list of “Rooms or resources” when you are creating a meeting, and support advanced features such as automatically declining meeting invitations when there are clashes and double bookings. They are also automatically shared with all user accounts in your Google organization.

If you do not wish to use Resources, it is also possible to set up each meeting room as a Shared calendar. Shared Calendars do not show up as resources when creating a meeting, and do not automatically decline bookings if there is a conflict. They also require you to share each calendar individually with the Google account you intend to use with UnSpot, so using Resources is highly recommended.

Choose an account to connect to UnSpot

Once you have set up your meeting rooms, you will need to choose a Google account from your organization to use with UnSpot (this can be either a new account or an existing one). You will need to choose an account that has access to all the meeting room calendars that you want to use with UnSpot. UnSpot requires full (read & write) access to the calendars in order to use advanced features such as room booking and check-in.

We recommend pairing UnSpot with a generic (“service”) booking account (like [email protected]) instead of a personal one (like [email protected]). If your company already uses a generic (“service”) booking account to manage your meeting rooms, that’s what you’ll want to pair with UnSpot. If not, we recommend that the administrator for your company’s Google account for Business creates a user account to manage bookings for UnSpot.

Why use a dedicated (“service”) booking account?

Think of this as the invisible booking assistant for your office. Any anonymous calendar invitations will come from this account, and any events booked through UnSpot that can’t be created on behalf of the user will show up on calendars owned by this account. Adding a booking account keeps your personal calendar clear of other folk’s events.

Prepare calendar to work with UnSpot

Checklist of required steps:

1. Share the resource calendar to the service account
2. Subscribe the service account to the resource calendar

Step 1. Share the resource calendar to the service account

Select the desired calendar > Settings and sharing
In the section “Share with specific people or groups” add a user or group, select “Make changes and manage sharing“

Note: To grant access to “Making changes and granting access“, make sure that the user account is active in the administrative console.

For more information on how to share resource calendars, please consult the Google guide. For each meeting room resource, you will need to add the Google account you wish to use with UnSpot under Share with specific people and give it your desired permissions.

Please note that after sharing the calendars you will need to accept the share requests. To do this, log into GMail with your chosen Google account. You should see a sharing notification email for each meeting room calendar. Open each email and click the button titled Add this calendar to accept the share. You should now be able to see the meeting room calendar from your Google account.

Step 2. Subscribe the service account to the resource calendar

Google guide how to Subscribe to Calendar

In the “Other Calendars” section, add the necessary available resources.

Owerview

By default, only events booked through UnSpot will be able to auto-extend and end early. To enable these features with any event booked on your domain’s calendars (including employees), you will need to give your service account (i.e. [email protected]) a few extra permissions.

A quick analogy: If you hired a new employee you would be able to see their calendar and invite them to meetings, but you wouldn’t be able to change their schedule unless they gave you permission to edit their calendar directly (or you have it via admin powers). In this case, your new “employee” is a room.

For events booked through UnSpot (i.e. room displays, web, mobile apps) the booking user will be the organizer on your behalf and these permissions are given by default. If UnSpot is unable to edit the organizer’s event for some reason, it will fall back to updating the room calendar’s version.