A few weeks ago we published a tutorial explaining how to sync your MS Teams Calendar with Google Calendar, taking advantage of the fact that both Microsoft and Google support the ICS (iCalendar) format: what we did there was showing how to obtain a unique iCal URL (from the Outlook website) and then subscribe it using the Google Calendar "other calendars" feature.
That's great, right? Except for the fact that, sometimes, these "external calendars" don't get refreshed by Google Calendar whenever we update them, for example when adding new events to them. Such an issue is fairly common with external iCal calendars - especially those published by MS Outlook - and could seriously hinder the whole feature: there are few things worse than the false sense of security of having all our events under control, only to find out that some of them are missing.
In this post, we'll share a couple of suggestions that we can put in place with little or no effort to fix this dreadful issue.
Method #1: Activate Google Sync
You won't believe it, but there is a well-hidden Google Calendar "sync" setting that is not reachable from within the main interface which seems to affect the external calendar updates.
Such settings can be reached from this URL:
If you go there, you'll be able to turn the syncing feature ON and/or OFF for all your calendars. The "funny" part about that is that syncing is turned off by default for all the subscribed calendars, which is most likely the reason why Google Calendar doesn't refresh your newly-added calendar(s): be sure to fix that behavior by turning it ON.
Method #2: Use a Google Script
The above method will likely fix your issue: however, Google Calendar doesn't sync iCal feeds as often as you might think. According to this article, the changes applied to an iCal feed might take up to 48 hours to be visible in Google Calendar: definitely too much for a tool that is meant to be used on a daily basis and multiple times a day.
To overcome this limitation, we can use this brilliant Google App Script (made by @derekantrican) that will force Google Calendar to automatically refresh any given subscribed calendar every N minutes:
The above GitHub project page will help you set up and configure the script.
Conclusions
That's it: we hope that these suggestions will help those who are looking for a quick and effective way to force Google Calendar to refresh/update their subscribed calendars.
I get the following error – I am not familiar with running these scripta – any help appreciated…
Error
DNS error: http://h
callWithBackoff @ Helpers.gs:939
fetchSourceCalendars @ Helpers.gs:80
startSync @ Code.gs:151