In today’s busy world, everyone uses calendars to maintain their work schedules. Calls with clients, project deadlines, and meetings all must be scheduled, and writing things down won’t cut it anymore. With everyone’s hectic schedules, online calendars are a great tool for ensuring that everyone is free when your meeting is actually scheduled and that everyone involved receives all updates to your events. Salesforce calendars provide different scheduling functionalities to make your employee’s lives even easier. With integration options to existing calendars used by employees, specific types of calendars for different needs, and integration options, Salesforce calendars will help your employees spend less time scheduling and more time on meaningful activities, like projects.

Integration is Key: Sync Your Google Calendar With Your Salesforce Calendars

Everything integrates these days, and Salesforce is not the exception! You can sync your Google calendar with Salesforce to ensure that your calendars are always accurate and up to date. With integrated calendars, reps will be able to keep all information related to an Event consolidated in Salesforce. This is important because reps should not have to go back and forth between systems to try and find missing information.

Although this feature is available in both Lightning and Salesforce Classic, you can only sync to Salesforce Classic, as in, only events created in Google Calendars will show up to a Salesforce Classic calendar or org. If you create an event in Salesforce Classic, this cannot get sync back to your Google Calendar. This is not the case for Lightning, however, once Lightning Sync is enabled.

Types of Salesforce Calendars: Public and Resource

In Salesforce there are a few different types of calendars that you can use for various business purposes as needed. Salesforce Public Calendars are good to be used for managing or tracking group activities or events. For example, you can use a public calendar to schedule a common activity, like a weekly meeting. You can also create Resource Calendars which can be used for a shared office resource, like a smartboard or specific meeting room. These different calendars are easy to create and can help your team stay on schedule or understand what resources may be available to be used when.

Set up Public Calendars or Resources:

• Search for “calendar” in the Quick Find Box
• Company Settings >> Calendar Settings >> Public Calendars and Resources

Sharing Salesforce Calendars: Let Users See What They Need To See

Calendar sharing is an important feature you can set up for your Users in Salesforce. Some Users may need access into different public or resource calendars so they are aware and up to date on events. In other cases, a calendar may need to be private so only a few Users have access to it. You can share calendars in both Salesforce Classic and Salesforce Lightning and depending on your sharing settings, Users can even change their own settings to make their calendars as accessible to others as they’d like.

Sharing for Personal User Calendars:

• Setup >> Sharing Settings
• Under the Organization-Wide Defaults related list, click Edit
• Select a default security access setting

Sharing for a public calendar or resource:

• Setup >> Public Calendars and Resources >> Sharing

• Add the different public groups, Users, or roles that you’d like by clicking Add and adding them to New Sharing
• Select the sharing level you’d like to use in Calendar Access

Calendar Integration With Salesforce Project Management Tools

Another perk of Salesforce calendars is that they can be used alongside functionality in project management tools. For example, using the Salesforce project management tool Inspire Planner, you have the ability to create Projects and Project Tasks in Salesforce, while with Salesforce calendars in Lightning, you can create custom calendars based on Salesforce objects. This means that you can create calendars right from Projects and Project Tasks! You can have a specific calendar for a project containing whichever details about it that you want. Additionally, by using calendars to track your Project Tasks, you will have full visibility into what is due when helping you manage project deadlines and ensure employees are completing their tasks on time.

Let Reps Set Up Reminders To Never Miss Another Event

Similar to notifications of events in Google Calendars, you can allow your sales reps to set up Event Reminders in Salesforce. This will help make sure reps do not miss any important client meetings or other types of events. Users can set up the event reminders themselves, which is great so only the reps who want to receive reminders do so. To allow reps to start using event reminders, you must ensure that reminders are enabled so Users can actually see them pop up in their browsers.

Next, ensure in-app notifications are enabled by searching for “Salesforce Notifications” in the quick search and checking the “Enable” box. Finally, don’t forget to add the Reminder Set field to Event page layouts!