+52145

No progress after 8 years? Sheesh! This seems like a trivial thing to implement, too!

If you want to know our usecase: we have an external tool to track leave/absences. The tool publishes the team's absences over HTTP in ICS format. Everyone can subscribe to it, but it's a pain in the arse. It would be much more useful if we could automatically add this to the team's calendar, so it's managed in one place, instead of in everyone's calendar view.

Dorothy, use this add on to solve your problem:
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.elitesoftsp.confluence.calendar.insights.plugins/server/overview
You can read their release note to know how to use
Release note

Any progress on this ? or is there any add-on can do this?

This is such an awesome idea. gc_atlassian OutOfTheBox indeed!

I fixed this with some HTML and JavaScript. Put it on a wiki page or in a macro and when a user visits the page they are subscribed to the calendar. Bonus: wrap it in SQL to detect if a user has already subscribed to the calendar or not.

The logic is:
1) Run a SQL to determine if the user is subscribed to the chosen calendar
Throw a message if the SQL returns no result.
2) Run JavaScript on the page to detect the failure message from the SQL
3) If the failure message is detected then activate the calendar subscribe script to force the user to subscribe to the calendar

The other way is to do all of this in SQL using a where clause to add the calendar if they are not subscribed, noting that hitting the DB directly should be avoided and not everyone has Bob's excellent SQL macro.

As a V3 macro this looks like this:

## Macro title:      auto-cal-subscribe
## Macro has a body: N
## Body processing:  N/A
## Output:           Text message if no calendar subscriptions are detected which is used to auto subscribe the user to a calendar
##
## Developed by:     OutOfTheBox


## @noparams

## 1. Detect the user's logon id
## 2. Determine if the user has any Calendars by reading OS_PROPERTYENTRY
## 3. If no calendar subscriptions are found then run the auto-calendar-subscribe macro

## Hide the error box if the page does not have confluence-admin edit rights so users can't see the SQL
{style}div.error { display: none !important; }{style}


## Retrieve userid
#set( $username = "$req.getRemoteUser()" )

## Read database to determine if this user currently has a calendar subscribed
{show-to:group=confluence-users}
{sql-query:dataSource=wiki|autoNumber=true|table=false|output=wiki|noDataMessage=NoCalendarDetected}
select  case ENTITY_ID
                   when 0 then ''
                   else 'No calendars detected'
            end as STATUS
  from OS_PROPERTYENTRY 
 where 
       entity_name = 'CWD_$username'
   and entity_key  = 'calendar'
   and text_val like '%subCalendar%'
{sql-query}
{show-to}

## This is the form which is used to subscribe to a calendar
{html}
<!-- Create the form for subscribing to the test calendar -->
<form name="autosubscribetocalendar" id="autosubscribetocalendar" class="hidden" method="POST" action="http://confluence.internal/wiki/calendar/subscribetocalendar.action">
      #form_xsrfToken() <!-- Generate atl_token input field -->
      <input type="hidden" name="subCalendarId" value="e1310ae6-e9db-45ff-8316-5da18c514f8f">    <!-- Calendar to subscribe this user to -->    
      <input type="submit" value="Subscribe" >
</form>
{html}

## This is the javascript which triggers the form
## If the result of the first SQL outputs the text 'NoCalendarDetected' then this script will trigger 
{html}
<script type="text/javascript"> 
   AJS.$(document).ready(function() {    

       if ( AJS.$('p:contains("NoCalendarDetected")').length > 1 ) { 
          AJS.$("#autosubscribetocalendar").submit();    // Submit the form to auto subscribe the user to the test Calendar
       }
       AJS.$('p:contains("NoCalendarDetected")').hide(); // The user does not need to see this value on the page
       AJS.$('div.error').remove();                      // Prevent users from seeing the SQL error if missing permissions to run sql-query
   });   
</script> 
{html}

Change the SQL to detect the calendar to automatically subscribe a user to. Put the macro on a wiki page.
Alternatively, convert this to HTML and put it in your Custom HTML at the end of the body.
Or, publish a link to the calendar in a public place e.g. _http://confluence.internal/wiki/calendar/previewcalendar.action?subCalendarId=e1310ae6-e9db-45ff-8316-5da18c514f8f_ so people can find it.

Atlassian!!!!!!! You sell it in your promotion video as tool that will help to track all days off etc BUT how is it possible to keep it on track if there's not option to share a calendar for everyone? There's no even obvious way to subscribe to it, you must know a name of calendar to be able to find it?? WTF?????

I love your products, but there's so much stupid decisions in it. You're a fucking stupid corporation!

That is unfortunate that Atlassian is not considering this on any type of roadmap. This is one of the key tiems to get users to utilize the calendar and also not provide an excuse of "they didn't know". There are some calendars that you want all or a specific subset of users to subscribe to so as to not be able to plead ignorance of not knowing. And, because of the performance issues that continue, every few quarters, we have to delete a calendar that becomes difficult to work with (slowness) and create a new one that we want to have the same subscribers to. Those that get emailed to resubscribe to a new calendar are annoyed.

Those are a few of our critical use cases.

When speaking in general terms of companies where *mostly non-techies are using the software, these users are mostly dumb in terms of how to use an application.. and thus cannot -or don't have the brains to find or search other company resources which might be important for them.

This happens far to much unfortunately and so this option is very important for many companies.

In MS Exchange in combination with Outlook, a sys admin has the possablity to add a mailbox and therefore calendar automatically remotely

Hey mgilbert, we don't have immediate plans to implement this. We're currently doing some long-term research that aims to identify the biggest issues that prevent users from utilizing TC effectively. This is one of the issues that'll we'll discuss, and eventually prioritize (but I can't say anything about timing or priority at this point).

Can we get some proper feedback from the folks at Atlassian?
Four years have already passed since this request popped up. And yet it didn't become less important!

This functionality would be a huge asset to administrators and to the end user. I agree with @mgilbert, asking all of my users to subscribe to specific calendars is becoming a huge pain.

THIS! Very well described and I would definitely say mandatory for usage in larger companies

You're right Marc!

Is there any indication when this issue is/might be planned for a feature release?

We also need this feature! It's an administrators nightmare to tell every new user "please subscribe to these 23408234 calendars" knowing that this won't happen to work.

Huge ups for this – for me it's SO important to make bringing people onboard Confluence as low-impact as possible. The best I can do right now is make a how-to video or documentation page for people to get subscribed to the relevant calendars, but it should be as simple as "click the Calendars tab".

I'll also add that for us, it's not important that the subscription be forced necessarily, but that the subscription is manageable by an admin. But even if those two things can't be elegantly separated, this will be well worth the effort.

+1 from me as well!

+1 ... hope we see this option in Calendars soon !

+1 as well. We have a 'master' corporate calendar which holds company events, office closures, etc. and it would be extremely nice if we could have it pre-populated for all of our users instead of them needing to add it manually.

+1 to this feature!

I would also see default calendars for groups as a very critical addition to Team Calendars. You do not want to tell everybody who joins that they need to add 5 calendars manually. They will forget and it's against the concepts of a Wiki, where things are open and discoverable by default.

Any updates on when this will be available?

Senseless it's not implemented already

This would also be more than helpful for us. Managing Calendars / Projects / Tasks using Confluence via page, so that we would be able to link for exemple user authorization on a specific page with a calendar linked to the same page ...
Thanks for your future implementation
Please do let us know if this is considered for implementation
Elise

This would be very helpful to us. We want to subscribe user groups to calendars so that they are automatically receiving notifications and don't have to rely on individuals subscribing themselves to it or reminding new hires to do so.

This is helpful for general group calendars such as the HR and Training Calendar, Engineering Out of Office calendar, Release Calendar, etc.

We would also like this feature. We have a large pool of developers organised into different project spaces. They use Confluence not only as a wiki but as a dashboard to the development infrastructure too. As an example of how this feature would be benefit us: It would be useful for users to be auto-subscribed to infrastructure calendars so they can be notified of upcoming maintenance related downtime or other support related events.

Expecting every user to subscribe to a calendar (or in our case multiple calendars) is unnecessarily inefficient and makes these calendars unmanageable.

It would also be incredibly useful to be able to manage subscription of these calendars according to LDAP group memberships.

Is this feature being considered for implementation?

@Sherif Mansour [Atlassian] Talking more or less about admins. Since the IT department here has been designated to prepare confluence for corporate use, a feature allowing admins to force subscriptions to calendars would keep it running smooth. Imagine being able to assign calendars to users based on their user groups and not having to deal with new users who are new to confluence and are asking a million questions already. This feature would just be another step in making the confluence admins job just a little bit easier.

[@cplhopper] are you talking about Confluence admins or calendar owners? Just trying to get abetter understanding if who you think would be adding these users to calendars

Being able to define which calendars new and existing users are automatically subscribed to would be a helpful tool. We have just migrated most of our articles/references from screwturnwiki into confluence 4.2.5 and are in the beginning stages of our development using confluence as a whole for the company to use in collaborating projects and events. A feature allowing the administrators to do the forced subscription would help keep our operations running smoothly without the question of new/existing users on how to use team calendars.

We would like to have option 2 "Subscribe selected users (or all users from selected groups) to selected calendars" to be implemented.
Our use case is that we have a small team that should receive automatically emails when new events are added or existing ones are updated. Now because we don't know if everyone is receiving the watch (because they haven't enabled it) we have to send a separate email along.
Which of course frustrates the users who set their watches correctly.

Maybe someone knows some SQL to perform this action as current workaround?

We have a similar need. We schedule our team members to work across multiple projects and locations as we are consulting practice working with numerous clients and lots of travel.

Ideally, we would want to have each individuals Client/Location Calendar to just appear for them. They should not need to subscribe to it. It could be populated via SQL or we could have a iCal Url with their user id as a variable within the URL. Either way, we would want the calendar to appear for each individual and it would be read only as the schedule is updated 3 times a week via a separate process.

Thanks,
Darcy

I would compare this not to "Manage Watches", but rather to "Page Permissions". If a calendar were a confluence page (and I find it a bit strange that it is not - if it is not), I'd just make it available to everyone, or to some group - they will see it without the need to subscribe. If I have to send everyone a link to a page so they can view it, that's not quite a wiki, right?

Yes I discovered that I can share a calender, and that the user can look a calendar up and add it. But I see this as an unnecessary compexity - because even if the user has added a calendar to "my calendars", he still can turn on/off each calendar in the view. So it should be fine to add all calendars available to the user to "My Calendars" - and let the user turn off the unneeded.

Given that calendars can be shared with permissions (TEAMCAL-102): if someone has shared a calendar with the user, the user in fact needs to see that calendar's events and be notified about them.

Use case: vacations calendar again - I don't want to put up an instruction to every user how to find and add vacation calendar, I just want it to be there in every user's calendar view.

I can think of other use cases as well, but probably other people could chime in.

Thanks!
Igor

Thanks for the feedback, Igor. I've renamed the issue. I guess what you are really after is something like the Confluence "Manage Watchers" feature but for Calendars?

Could you give me an example of where this would be helpful for you?

I should also note, that you can easily "Share" a calendar with others by selecting "Share" from the dropdown menu and sending those users a link to the calendar. If they are not subscribed to the calendar, they will be asked if they wish to add it to their calendar list... Did you know about this feature?