Updates 🥳

The Direct URL method allows you to build automated add-to-calendar links into your email campaign templates to give your users add-to-calendar links customized just for them. And now we've just made it even easier to use by including all that great functionality in the latest version of our Zapier integration. This means you can now automatically add add-to-calendar links to your emails without writing a single line of code. 

Simply connect your CRM, email campaign tool, webinar/video conferencing platform or events database with AddEvent in Zapier to unlock this powerful new functionality. Once your AddEvent account is connected in Zapier, simply choose the new "Direct URL Method" trigger from the options within the zap! Make sure you check out our 5-minute tutorial to get started.

Use cases:

• Automatically insert add-to-calendar links in confirmation and reminder emails when your users register for an event or book an appointment
• Include a unique Zoom webinar link in the calendar invite you send to each participant who signs up for your event
• Include a personalized event description for each user with information from your CRM
• Share different events with your users based on their time zone or location

Resources to check out:

• AddEvent & Zapier integration
• A quick tutorial to get you set up
• The Direct URL Method documentation

We've been busy making some fixes and improvements to our software:

• When several of our tools (add-to-calendar button, embeddable events list, embeddable calendar) were combined on a single page, the add-to-calendar button was sometimes not being positioned correctly. We've made an update to make sure the add-to-calendar button is always positioned correctly.
• In the embeddable calendar, upcoming events with a recurring rule were not showing up correctly going into the future. That has been corrected so recurring events are now displayed accurately.
• On AddEvent you can synchronize events from external calendars. Typically the dates and times of events in the external calendar feeds are in UTC time. We now automatically convert those dates and times into local time instead of leaving them in UTC.
• In the Zapier List Events trigger, all events were not being listed from across all calendars, only the Main Calendar. We have resolved the issue and released Zapier version 5.0.2 as well as migrated all users to this version so it takes effect immediately.

On a regular basis, we test the methods for adding events to calendars. We currently have two methods we would like to get back to using - those methods are: 

• Outlook.com + Office 365 (direct methods).
  
  These two methods allow us to send the user directly to their calendar app without having to grant access to our app at Microsoft.
  These methods are getting very close to working again. They have been tested but still fail to produce good content. We’ll continue using the Microsoft Events API for inserting events into the user’s calendar until the issues have been resolved by Microsoft.
  
  
• Yahoo.com (direct method)
  
  This method has been out of service since Yahoo updated its calendar service in January 2021. We’ve reworked how we add events to Yahoo and we’re now able to add events again. When we parse date/time to Yahoo all date formats are ignored by Yahoo. Therefore we now on the basis of the user’s IP time zone convert the events date/time to the user’s date/time and parse it to Yahoo Calendar. This leaves some room for errors but for the majority of users, it’ll work as intended.
  
  We obviously hope Yahoo Calendar and the team responsible for Yahoo Calendar will fix the issues the whole world is experiencing. 

Yahoo’s "Add to Calendar" functionality is broken. We went down to their HQ this morning and put up a sign to let them know. We're hoping the message will go through to the right team(s) fast and that Yahoo Calendar will work again shortly. 

With events with RSVP you can use "Custom RSVP templates". The custom RSVP templates allow you to change: 

• Confirmation email (which is sent out when users RSVP for the event).
• A reminder X hours before the event occurs
• A reminder X days before the event occurs

We've added the option to send out "Follow-up Emails". The follow-up email can, if activated, be sent out X hours after the event occurs. This functionality is brilliant if you want to automatically get reviews for your event, ask your attendees what they think about the event, etc. 

We've fixed some issues in relation to our recurring rules. The issues fixed include: 

• Fixed some specific recurring rules that did not work well with specific calendar vendors. 
• Improved the event landing pages to reflect the recurring rule so users would know how many times the event occurs. 
• Improved the event landing pages to show the upcoming event date, and last event date in case the event is past. 

We've improved the way you can delete events in the Dashboard. 

In the Dashboard you can create three types of events: 

• Singular events
• Singular events with recurrence
• Events in a series

We've improved the event deletion process to now include all of these three events. For instance, if you try to delete an event in a series you will be able to select "this" event, "following events", or "all" events. 

We've been working hard on adding "real" recurring events to our platform. We had an assumption that it would be a lot of hard work, and we were right. 
The struggle with a platform like ours is that we want our recurring events to work across all calendar vendors. After a lot of testing and tweaking, we ended up with a solution that works with all calendar vendors except for Yahoo/AOL which doesn't support recurring rules. 

Creating an event
When you create an event in the Dashboard you now have an option to make the event recurring, e.g. every Monday until a specific date. When the event is saved, the event is represented on the Dashboard calendar for X number of times (according to the rule). Events with recurrence can be shared as a singular event or shared as an event inside a calendar. 

The event landing pages, calendar landing pages, embeddable calendars have also been updated to support the recurring rules. 

We've reworked our .ics file generator to use time zones instead of ZULU time. 

A .ics file is used by the calendar apps when users add an event to their calendar. Before we were using ZULU time to indicate when an event was beginning and ending. The time format works great and is a standard, however, some calendar clients didn't convert the time to the user's local time - resulting in the users being confused. 

With the time zone supported format, the start and end time is parsed as is, meaning if the event is set to begin at 9 am, 9 am is parsed directly along with the time zone for the event. That enables calendar apps to handle the time based on the time zone and show it in a better way to the end-users. 

It looks like the good folks over at Microsoft (over-the-night) have made some updates to their calendar services. The updates have resulted in the way we normally add events don't work anymore.

How we typically add events
When users click the "Outlook.com" or "Office 365" option in one of our "Add to Calendar" buttons, we normally redirect the users directly to the selected calendar service. The redirect contains a URL with different parameters containing all of the event information. This method is great and we like it. However, this method has currently been turned off and does not work. It might be a temporary error - or it might be a long-lasting thing. We don't know yet.

Our fix
As a result, we've switched our backup-setting on. Now all "event adds" will be processed using the Microsoft Calendar API. In order to add events in Outlook.com and Office 365 users initially need to grant AddEvent.com permission to add events to their calendar. This is a one-time grant and once it has been done future events will be added right away. 

In order to address any privacy concerns, we've added an article to inform users about AddEvent.com and the "Grant access" process.
https://www.addevent.com/privacy/outlook-calendar

Back in 2017, we launched CalendarX which offers embeddable calendars users can subscribe to. The website and tools offer a lot of functionality including: 

• Embeddable calendar.
• Users can subscribe to a calendar.
• You can see who has subscribed, block a user, download the subscriber's list.
• Custom templates allowing you to change everything in the calendar templates. 

We've added all of the above functionality to AddEvent, and updated the UX. 

We’ve added a new analytics summary page that is available for all accounts, regardless of subscription type.

While full analytics (with more detailed information broken down by individual calendars, events, and sharing methods) is still reserved for Small Business annual, Professional, and Enterprise subscriptions, the summary page displays basic account usage stats for the current month and all-time, so all customers will have a clearer picture of their account usage.

We now offer integrations for Salesforce, HubSpot, MailChimp and more!

As more of our customers started using RSVP functionality to collect information from their users, we wanted to give them the ability to automate the distribution of that information to other third-party software platforms they’re using.

Now when a user RSVP's to your event or subscribes to your calendar, you can automatically have that user's information synced with your CRMs and email campaign and marketing tools using one of our Zapier integrations.

You can now collect RSVPs for your event with our new online RSVP functionality.

Enabling event RSVP functionality is as simple as checking the RSVP box on the event creation page. When your users navigate to your RSVP event landing page, they’ll be prompted to fill out your RSVP form, after which an Add to Calendar button will appear so they can add your event to their calendar!

Add RSVP functionality to your events to keep track of who is coming and to collect names, email addresses and any other custom information you wish to gather from your attendees.

With the launch of our new website and Dashboard, we also compiled and updated (re-wrote) comprehensive Documentation for all of our products. 

This is the one guide to rule them all. If you ever have questions about how to use our website or any AddEvent software, you can find the answers in the Documentation.

In response to amazing feedback from our customers, we’ve merged our Events and Subscription Calendar tools into a new, easy-to-understand Dashboard. This intuitive and powerful interface is designed to help you get your events onto your customers' calendars without needing any coding experience. 

• Easily create your calendars and events right in the Dashboard
• Alternatively, you can import events from external calendars
• As you add events, see them clearly laid out in your Dashboard calendars
• Each event and calendar has its own event or calendar page from which you can edit and share the event or calendar

When you’re ready to share your events, you can share them with your users one by one or share an entire calendar of events all at once. The sharing options for your events and calendars are as diverse and powerful as ever, but now they’re cleanly grouped together on the event and calendar pages. Embed a beautiful "Add to calendar" button or calendar on your website, copy and paste "Add to Calendar" links into your emails (zero coding knowledge required) or share a custom event landing page with your users. 

We hope you the new Dashboard, and as always, we’d love to hear your feedback!