How to synchronize with Google, Outlook, Exchange and other third party calendars

You can synchronize the appointment records stored in your Aware IM system with third party calendars, for example Google Calendar, Outlook, iCloud and so on. Synchronization with third party calendars in Aware IM is performed using Cronofy API, so before you can use synchronization you need to create an account with Cronofy (https://www.cronofy.com/ ) and create an application for your Cronofy account. Once you create an application with Cronofy you will be given “Client ID” and “Client Secret”. Write them down as you will need them in Aware IM. You can also see a full list of calendars that are supported at the Cronofy web site.

To support calendar synchronization in Aware IM you will need to do the following:

1. Create a query that will display “Appointment” objects as a calendar (see the previous section
2. Define a Panel Operation for your query. Select the type of the operation to be “Synchronize with Calendar”.
3. Click on the Settings button to define some properties of this operation. You will then need to enter the Client ID and Client Secret that you have obtained from Cronofy.
4. If your “Appointment” object supports “appointment owners” (for example, a list of attendees of an event or a list of people responsible for the task) you can get Aware IM to read the information about event attendees and automatically associate them with objects in your application. To do this:
   1. Define an object representing an “event attendee”.
   2. Provide a relationship between an “Appointment” object and the “Attendee” object – it has to be a multiple reference inside the Appointment object
   3. When specifying settings of the synchronization operation tick the checkbox that your appointments (events) support attendees.
   4. Select the reference attribute defined at b)
   5. Define how Aware IM should map attendees read from a third party calendar to the “attendee” object defined in your application – it can map them by their email address or display name or both.

At runtime the operation will be represented by a button displayed above or below the calendar. When the users press this button Aware IM will ask the user to select the calendar to synchronize with and whether perform a one-way or two-way synchronization. You can perform synchronization multiple times – in this case Aware IM will only deal with changes that happened to occur in both calendars since the time of last synchronization.

Note that there is also a type of Panel Operation that synchronizes with a Google Calendar only. This operation type has now been superseded with a more generic operation and will be eventually phased out. However it can still be used now to synchronize with a Google Calendar.