I just started using Famundo for organizations.

I am trying to sync (at least in a view only fasion) a Famundo calendar with Outlook via iCal instead of via the Famundo Outlook sync plugin. This will allow people to choose which calendars they want see in Outlook, without having to become a Famundo user/member on our organization’s Famundo account. My current understanding of the Famundo Outlook plugin is that it only allows selective calendar viewing in Outlook if the Outlook user has a Famundo user/member account.

I have a different 3rd party Outlook plugin that is successfully allowing me to copy/paste in iCal URLs which then display in an Outlook calendar. I’ve read in the help documentation that Famundo allows for iCal subscriptions to its calendars. I also tried using the subscribe link in Famundo, but was prompted to download an ical file instead of getting access to a URL. Outlook tried to open the file, but I was told there was an error related to appointments set to gregorian instead of lunar…or lunar instead of gregorian…I forget which.

My main questions is, where can I access an iCal URL for my Famundo calendars? Also, if you happen to know a way to fix the error that popped up in Outlook, that would be great too.

Thanks,
Eric

Well, I’ve had some success with this. One of the issues is that in order for the third party Outlook plugin to work, all the events on the calendar must have a public viewing access level.

Another issue is that if the calendar is reloaded in Outlook and there have not been any updates to the calendar since the last time it was reloaded, the link between Outlook and Famundo is broken and all the calendar entries disappear in Outlook. Once a new item is added to the Famundo calendar, the Outlook calendar can be reloaded and all the events, including the newest one, appear. So the trick is to make sure all events are public and to not reload in Outlook unless there has been an update to the calendar.

Once I have it working really well, I’ll post a link to the Outlook plugin with a review of the setup. I think many users could find it helpful in certain situations.

OK. I seem to have this working now. The third party Outlook plugin can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=697660

I have not had any problems with it yet except for what I mentioned in the post above. With this plugin, you don’t have to have to use the famundo Outlook plugin or have a famundo user account to sync with Outlook. All you have to do is copy the url embedded in the “subscribe as icalendar” link in famundo for the calendar you want to sync to and paste it in the appropriate field that becomes available in Outlook once the plugin is installed. Then you can choose whether to sync the famundo calendar to your main Outlook calendar, or (before subscribing) create a new outlook calendar to sync the subscription to.

This is very handy in our situation, because there may be things (like meetings you have to attend) for which you want to appear “busy” in Outlook (so you subscribe to them in your main outlook calendar), and other things (like campus events) for which you want to see them in Outlook, but don’t want to appear “busy,” (so you create a new Outlook calendar for them).

Hopefully some other folks can find this useful.

Cheers!
Eric

I haven’t spent enough time testing it yet to find occasional errors like what you describe with Lightening. All of the events I currently have entered were from imported CSV files, which apparently do not handle recurrent events. I will look for this error, though, as I continue to work with Famundo.