Section 4.5: Syncing External Calendars

To ensure your availability is always up to date without manual entry, ABRAM supports real-time inbound calendar synchronization with Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar.

Once connected, any event added to your external calendar automatically updates your availability in ABRAM, preventing scheduling conflicts and ensuring the AI matchmaking engine has accurate data.

1. Setting Up the Integration

You can link your external calendars from the Settings page:

1. Navigate to Settings in the sidebar.
2. Select the Connectors tab.
3. Under App Connectors, you will see the integration widget.
4. Click Connect next to either Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook Calendar.
5. Follow the authentication prompts to authorize ABRAM to view and synchronize your calendar events.

Once authorized, your active connection is established, and the platform registers a secure connection to listen for updates.

2. How Calendar Syncing Works

When you make changes to your external Google or Outlook calendars, updates appear in ABRAM within seconds.

How it Works:

1. Trigger: You create, edit, or delete an event in Google Calendar or Outlook.
2. Sync: The calendar provider securely notifies ABRAM of the change.
3. Update: ABRAM updates your availability:
   • No Duplicates: Calendar entries are aligned to prevent duplicates.
   • Clear Source: Synced events are labeled with their source (Google or Outlook).
   • Busy Blocks: Events are cataloged as external commitments so producers know you are busy.
   • Precise Timing: Start/end times, timezones, and repeating schedules are synced.
4. Deletion: If you delete an event externally, the blockout is removed from ABRAM.

3. Real-Time Capacity & Privacy

Event Title Privacy

[!IMPORTANT] To protect your privacy, ABRAM anonymizes synced external event details. Producer users, managers, and AI matchmaking engines only see that you are "Busy" or "Blocked" during those hours. No personal event titles (e.g., "Doctor's Appointment") or notes are visible to producers.

Capacity Calculations

• Immediate Recalculation: As soon as an external event is written, your weekly capacity and remaining hours are updated.
• Matchmaking Blockouts: When a producer runs the AI matchmaking engine, the engine automatically sees your synced busy slots and factors them in. If an external booking leaves you with fewer than the required hours for a project slot, the engine will flag you as unavailable for that period.
• All-Day & Recurring Blocks: All-day events block out a standard 8-hour workday, and recurring events deduct from your capacity score for each repeating day.

4. Troubleshooting and Management

If your calendar events are not syncing, review these common troubleshooting steps:

Re-Authenticating Connections

If you change your external password or revoke application permissions, the sync connection will break.

1. Navigate to Settings > Connectors.
2. If a connection displays an error, click Disconnect.
3. Click Connect to re-authenticate with your provider and establish a fresh connection.

Sync Reset

In rare cases, sync connections become invalid (e.g., if application credentials expire). When this happens, click Re-Sync Now in your settings to force a full, clean synchronization of your external calendar.