Google Calendar Integration, Calendars for Members, & More

We're excited to announce some major improvements to the "Events" section of Breeze.  Historically our events section has related primarily to check in and attendance tracking and while those features are still there, we've added in additional options to make the events section a more powerful tool for scheduling and event organization.  Our updates are listed below.

Google Calendar Integration (and Outlook, Apple, & Others)

Breeze now supports integration with third party calendars, such as Google Calendar, allowing users to:

• Have your Breeze calendar events show up on your Google Calendar
• Have your Google Calendar events show up on your Breeze calendar

Some of the strongest benefits we see from this are:

• Adding your Breeze events into your daily calendar schedule
• Having an embedded Google Calendar on your website that includes your Breeze events
• Having your mobile device (iPhone, iPad, Android device, etc) include Breeze events

If you've created multiple calendars within Breeze, you have control over which ones sync over and so you can perform tasks such as:

• Sync public events to your church website calendar
• Sync private events to your iPhone calendar

For details on how to get started, check out our documentation on external calendar integration.

iPhone/iPad/Android Calendar Integration

Our external calendar integration (above item) provides the ability for users to have their Breeze calendar show up on other calendars, including mobile device calendars, making it easy for your team to stay on the same page with upcoming events.  If you're using multiple calendars within Breeze, you can even pick which calendars sync over to your mobile device.  For more information, see our documentation on external calendar integration.

Calendar for Members

In the past, the "Events" section has been more of an administrative tool focused on check in.  While these features remain, we've expanded the user permission options so that you can give someone access to only view the calendar and look at event descriptions but not check people in, view reports, create events, etc.  This is ideal for members who you've given access to Breeze and you want them to see the calendar but they should not have the ability to check people in or view check in reports.

If you're using multiple calendars within Breeze you can even decide which calendars they do and don't have access to.  To set this up, all you'll need to do is edit the role permissions for the users you'd like to apply this to.

Multiple Calendars

While we officially announced this a few weeks back, in case you missed it you can now create multiple calendars within Breeze and give users access to specific calendars.  For more information, view multiple calendars in our documentation.

Event-Specific Descriptions

In the past our events were set up so that an entire event series shared the same description.  As we shift to have events be a more powerful scheduling tool, we've updated descriptions so that you can create an event series with different descriptions depending on the date.

We're excited about the increased flexibility these updates provide and we hope they are a great tool for you, your team, and those you serve.  If you see any room for improvement or are simply excited about one of these additions, we'd love to hear about it; feel free to leave a comment below.