Your calendar is vital to the daily running of your business and, since ShootQ is now helping you run your business on a daily basis, it is pretty important in here as well.
There are two ways that ShootQ will integrate with your external calendar, as long as it supports RSS Feeds:
- ShootQ will send information on Shoots and Leads to you or your staff's desktop or online calendars (such as Apple (iCal) or Google Calendar) in Calendar Subscriptions. This way, all of your Leads and Booked Shoots can be updating your external calendars so you are always aware of your availability.
- ShootQ will read information sent from these same desktop or online calendars in Calendar Feeds. This aspect of the integration is how ShootQ will know your availability and present potential conflicts to you when receive a Lead. Your external calendars will be referenced and ShootQ will show you what events you may have scheduled that would interfere with a potential booking.
Below is a general explanation for Exporting and Importing calendar feeds. For specific integration instructions for the following popular calendars, just visit these knowledge base articles.
Exporting Calendar Feeds
To integrate your calendar with the outbound Calendar Subscription from ShootQ, click one of the Subscribe buttons under Calendar > Subscribe.
Start by clicking your calendar type (iCal (Apple), Google, Vista (Microsoft), or Other) on the left side of the interface. You may have several types of Subscriptions to choose from, depending on how many Brands and Users are set up in your account. You should see a Subscription for Leads and Booked Shoots for each Brand as well as one for every Photographer in your company, showing only the Booked Shoots each individual is assigned to. You may also see a subscription feed for Birthdays and Anniversaries.
Simply click the Subscribe button next to the Subscription you want to import into your calendar and copy the URL link provided. You will then add this URL link to your calendar as an additional calendar. If you are an Apple Calendar user, the program should open and initiate automatically so that you don't have to copy/paste the URL.
Please see the following knowledge base articles for a detailed explanation for exporting to that particular calendar.
Importing Calendar Feeds
The next step is to import your Calendar Feeds into ShootQ. You will need to log into your calendar and retrieve the iCal or Webcal formatted feed, as this is the format that ShootQ reads. Each of your external calendars has a feed URL. You need to find it, copy it, and then paste it into the External Feeds section in ShootQ under Calendar > Settings. You can name, color code, and share this calendar with other users of a brand as well.
When the feed is synced up, you'll see a check mark next to your calendar. As you can see, you can also add multiple calendars into the ShootQ calendar.
If you need further help with the following calendars, please visit these knowledge base articles for a detailed explanation for importing from that particular calendar. These articles will help you locate the feed URL for your calendar.
That's it! If you Import and Export your calendars properly, ShootQ will now feed your external calendar with Bookings, Events and Leads, and your external calendar will share all of its events with ShootQ. The events feeding into ShootQ will be visible in the Calendar section.
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