Communication -> Calendar in your admin dashboard.
A calendar for your team, beside the mail. Day, week, month and a schedule list, with appointments dragged into place and stretched to length on the grid.
An appointment is drawn as a quiet block with its calendar's colour as a line down the left edge, so a busy week stays readable. Today, the current time and the week you are looking at are marked in your firm's colour, and the small month in the column follows the grid as you move through it.
Calendars
Everybody gets their own calendar and the propfirm gets calendars the whole team shares, each in its own colour, switched on and off in the column on the left.
One of them is the firm's own calendar, named after you and at the top of everybody's column from the first visit. Everyone on the team reads it without being given it, only somebody who may manage calendars puts anything in it, and it cannot be deleted or shared away, so a company meeting or a payout day has one place to go and lands in everybody's week.
Calendars the whole team shares are made by anyone who may manage calendars and turn up for everybody without being shared one by one.
Labels
Appointments carry labels: what a meeting is about, as opposed to when it is and whose it is. They are made in the column beside the calendars, the same way the mail client does labels, renamed or deleted by right-clicking one, and used across every calendar at once.
Tick a label and the grid narrows to it, in every view and in search. An appointment wears its labels and its guest count wherever it is drawn, and the schedule names the guests outright, so a week can be read without opening anything.
An appointment
An appointment carries guests, a location, a description, a Google Meet or Zoom link with the meeting number and passcode kept separate so they can be read out, reminders in the app or by email, and a repeat.
Invite a colleague and the meeting also shows under their calendar, so ticking off everything except theirs answers what their day looks like, while the meeting stays one appointment that one person can move or call off.
Repeats
Daily, every weekday, weekly, monthly or yearly, every so many of them, running forever or ending on a date or after a number of times.
Changing or deleting one of a repeating appointment asks what you mean first, and takes all three answers: this one, this one and everything after it, or the whole series.
A weekly meeting stays on the same clock when the clocks change, and one on the 31st comes back to the 31st after February.
Sharing
Share a calendar with a colleague by name or with a whole role at once, at one of four levels:
| Level | What they get |
|---|---|
| Busy | They see the hour is taken and nothing about what it is taken by |
| Read | They can read the appointments |
| Book | They can put appointments in it |
| Manage | They can change and share it |
At the busy level the words never leave the server, which is what makes a personal calendar safe to share.
Invitations that arrive
Meeting invitations in your mail land on the calendar by themselves. The attachment every calendar programme sends is read when the mail arrives, so the subject, the time in its own timezone, the organiser, everybody invited and the Google Meet or Zoom link with its meeting number and passcode are all there.
It sits on the grid hollow until somebody accepts or ignores it, and the mail itself carries a bar with the same facts and the same two buttons, so nobody has to open a second screen to decide.
An organiser moving the meeting moves the one you have rather than adding a second, calling it off marks it instead of making it vanish, and a guest answering updates their line and nothing else.
Invitations you send
Put guests on an appointment of your own and they get a proper invitation from your own address, with the Accept and Decline buttons their own calendar draws, and their answers come back onto your guest list without anybody retyping anything.
Changing the meeting sends the change rather than a second invitation, deleting it sends the cancellation, and a repeating meeting carries its timezone so it stays on the same clock for everybody when the clocks change.
Guests are in blind copy, so a meeting between you and two customers does not introduce them to each other.
Nothing goes out unless you say so
Whether anything is sent is a tick box on the appointment, because correcting your own typo should not put mail in six inboxes.
Reminders
In the app or by email, at anything from the moment itself to a day ahead. A repeating appointment reminds you about the next occurrence rather than once and never again.
A change somebody else makes in a calendar you have open arrives on your screen by itself, without a refresh.
Search
Finds an appointment by its title, its description, its location, who is coming or who invited you, a year back and a year ahead, with everything still to come at the top and the past under it.
A calendar shared at the busy level is never searched, because a search box is otherwise a fine way to ask what an hour is taken by.
In and out as a file
Import the .ics another calendar exported and everything in it lands here,
repeats, changed occurrences and cancelled ones included, with a second import
of the same file changing nothing. The link under the create button takes a file
for any calendar you may write in, so a single invitation somebody emailed goes
in the same way a year of appointments does; a calendar's own settings import
into that one calendar.
Download any calendar the same way, or hand out a subscription link that any phone or desktop calendar can follow to keep a read-only copy up to date without a password, replaced or withdrawn whenever you like.
Subscribe to everything, at the foot of the calendar column, is the same idea for a person rather than for a calendar: one link carrying every calendar you can read, so a phone shows this workspace's calendar, your own, the team's and anything a colleague shared with you in a single subscription. What is in it is worked out on every fetch, so a calendar shared with you tomorrow appears on its own and one withdrawn disappears, without anybody touching the link. A calendar shared with you at the busy level stays out of it, the same way it stays out of a download.
Both kinds of link ask to be fetched every five minutes, and an unanswered invitation is in them as a tentative appointment rather than left out, so what a phone shows matches what this screen shows. Apple Calendar, Outlook and Thunderbird follow that interval. Google Calendar does not: it refetches external calendars on a schedule of its own, anywhere from a few hours to a day, and nothing in the file changes that.
Following a calendar from elsewhere
The other direction: the plus beside My calendars (or beside Other calendars,
for somebody who may manage calendars) offers From a URL. Paste the address
of any calendar published as .ics, such as Google Calendar's secret address in
iCal format, an Outlook published calendar or a public holiday calendar, and it
becomes a calendar here that keeps itself up to date. Links starting with
webcal:// work as they are.
Before anything is made, the address is checked and asked what it is. The name, the colour and how often it wants to be fetched come back filled in, and all three can be changed. A calendar made this way from the Other calendars plus is one of the whole team; from My calendars it is yours, and can be shared like any other.
What is in it is read-only here, for everybody: every fetch puts back what the source says, so a changed appointment is changed here, and one removed there is removed here. Its name, colour, how often it is fetched, its address and who else sees it stay editable in its settings, beside when it was last updated, when it is checked next, what went wrong if the last check failed, and a button to refresh it now. Deleting it takes the copy away and leaves the source alone.
How often it is fetched follows the calendar itself unless you choose otherwise:
its REFRESH-INTERVAL, then X-PUBLISHED-TTL, then the caching headers of the
server, then once an hour. Whatever the source asks for is kept between five
minutes and a week. A source that has not changed answers without sending the
file again, a failing one is retried less and less often up to once a day, and
one that says the calendar is gone for good (HTTP 410) is no longer asked until
somebody presses refresh.
Only addresses on the public internet can be followed. Followed calendars stay out of your own subscription links, so a Google calendar followed here and the link to everything pasted into Google do not show every appointment twice.
Find a time
Takes the guest list and offers the first slots that suit everybody, inside everybody's working hours and in everybody's own timezone. Clicking one moves the appointment there.
It sees exactly what you can see and nothing more: a colleague whose calendar is not shared with you is named as unknown rather than quietly assumed free, which is what makes sharing a calendar at the busy level worth doing.
Each person sets their own working week, any hours on any days, and it narrows the search without stopping anybody booking outside it.
Getting around
Right-click anything for the actions on it. An appointment offers open, edit, duplicate, delete and the two answers to an invitation, empty grid offers a new appointment at the hour you clicked, and a calendar in the column offers hide, show only this one, download and settings. Double-click an appointment to edit it.
The keyboard does the rest, and each shortcut is shown beside the control it belongs to:
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| D, W, M, A | Day, week, month, schedule |
| T | Back to today |
| Left, Right | The previous or next day, week or month |
| C | A new appointment |
| / | Search |
Guests are found by name as well as by address, so inviting a colleague is typing the first letters of their name.
In the older designs
A firm on Propper - OG or Tactical keeps the calendar it had: appointments as blocks filled with the calendar's colour, labels as coloured chips, and the view switcher, search and dialogs in that design's own style. Everything the calendar can do is the same in every design.