Outreach Technology

Our campus is in the process of moving towards Groupwise for our email and calendar solution for faculty and staff.  However, I wanted to just use my Google Calendar to keep up with all my appointments.  This tutorial will take you through my process of delegating my appointments to Google Calendar.

Step 1:  Delegating all appointments in Groupwise

Once you have Groupwise open, click on the Tools menu, and select Rules.

You will be taken to the Rules screen, and you will want to click on the “New…” button.  A new window will open which will let you add a new rule to your Groupwise system.

Fill in the “Rule name” (this can be anything you want it to be).  Under “When Event Is”, leave New Item selected and check the box for Received.  Under “Item Type”, make sure to check the box for Appointment.

The next thing to do is add an action to the rule.  From the “Add Action” menu, select Delegate…

This will bring you to the delegate window.

In the “To:” field, type in your gmail address.

NOTE:  GMail allows you to send things to yourgmailaddress+something@gmail.com and it will still go to yourgmailaddress@gmail.com.  However, it is important that you DO NOT use this feature here.  Because of the way GMail processes appointment emails, it will not get added to your Google Calendar.  So just put your regular gmail address into the “To:” field.

In the “Comments to sender:” box, put in some string which will be unique to Groupwise calendar events.  As you can see, I just used some random combination of characters and “GWAPPT”.  It is important that this is not something that is common in your emails, because we are going to be filtering off of that string in GMail.

When you are done, click “OK” on the delegate window.  You should see your rule show up in the “Rule List” on the “Rules” window.  Go ahead and hit the Close… button.

Congrats, now Groupwise is delegating appointments to your GMail address.  The next step is getting Google Calendar to process the events, and get them out of your GMail Inbox.

Step 2:  Filtering and Processing in GMail

GMail is magic.  Basically, if it receives an email that has calendar data in it, it will go ahead and add the appointment to your corresponding Google Calendar for you!  All we really need to do in GMail is tell it what to do with the emails it gets from Groupwise.  For me, I want it to just add it to my Google Calendar and delete itself.  Here is how I do that:

First, go to GMail and click on “Settings” in the upper navigation area.  In the “Settings” screen, click on the “Filters” tab.

Click on the “Create a new filter” link at the bottom of the “Filters” tab.

In the “Has the words:” text box, type in the same string that you typed into the “Comments to Sender” in your Groupwise delegation rule.  Click the Next Step button.

This will take you to the “Choose action” screen, where you will tell GMail what to do with messages that match your criteria that you set in the last step.

This is where your rule can differ from mine, but my goal is to not get any additional emails when something is added to my Google Calendar from Groupwise.  To do that, I selected the checkboxes for Skip the Inbox (Archive It) and Delete It.  This will ensure that my Inbox never sees the delegation message sent from Groupwise.

Once you have selected your options, click the Create Filter button.

Voila!  You now have GMail setup to process your appointments and put them on your Google Calendar.  To test it out, lets go back to Groupwise.

Step 3:  Testing it out!

In Groupwise, click the New Appt Button in the top tool bar.

This will bring up a new window to add an appointment to your Groupwise calendar.

Fill in any info you want, but make sure you are on the list of people in the “To:” field. When you are done, click the “Send” button at the top of the window.

Looks like it showed up in Groupwise.  Lets head over to our Google Calendar and see if everything worked!  If it did, I should have the same appointment on my Google Calendar.

There it is!  Everything worked as planned.  Now, everytime someone makes a meeting on your Groupwise calendar, it will be delegated to your Google Calendar, and not clutter up your GMail inbox!

A few notes:

• This only works from Groupwise to Google Calendar, and only when meetings are created.  If a meeting is removed from your Groupwise calendar, you will have to manually remove it from your Google Calendar.
• If you delete a meeting from your Google Calendar, it will still be around in Groupwise unless you go and manually delete it.  Also, if you create a meeting in Google Calendar, it will not be put on your Groupwise calendar.
• This has been tested on NCSU’s version of Groupwise, so no guarantees that this will work anywhere else.

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