Share Roster As Calendar

Roster

How to

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There are two ways to share a roster as a calendar either with other people or to the user to enable them to see their duties in the context of their personal calendar events :

1. From the Roster window select the button on the top-right side and a menu will pop-up with Share/Unshare Calendar option.  On an iOS device an additional option Subscribe to Calendar is available which will create a calendar share to the user themselves and add it to the iOS device's calendar.
2. From the Settings window you will find the Share/Unshare roster as calendar option under the GENERAL tab

From the Calendar Share window tap the + button at the top-right side to add a new share by providing an email address for the person the calendar is being shared to and a name to associate with that share.

When the OK button is tapped a unique share is created and an email is sent with instructions on how the recipient can access or otherwise load the calendar into their calendar application.

Technical information

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The calendar share is a web link to an iCal or iCalendar formatted file.  This file is generated every time the crew refreshes their roster and the file contains a standard iCal property named X-PUBLISHED-TTL that tells any calendar consuming application, e.g. Outlook, how long to wait until it refreshes from the original URL.  This refresh interval is set to 5 minutes so it should not be out of date as long as the calendar application correctly implements this refresh interval property.

Troubleshooting

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The issue that most often comes up is that the calendar does not update inside the consuming calendar application, e.g. Outlook.  There can be a few different reasons for this :

1. The calendar application may not support the refresh property of the iCal file format.
2. The calendar application may have it's own internal maximum refresh rate and so won't refresh even if the age of the file provided by CrewApp indicates it should.
3. The iCal file or URL may have been added as a static calendar, either as a one-time import or added as a file instead of a URL.  Some calendar applications import iCal files by default as a one-time import instead of as a link to a web calendar that it is.
4. The user is trying to add the iCal file or URL on Outlook's web version.  Apparently this is an unresolved issue that requires a fix from Microsoft.  See this tech support answer from Microsoft.