Connect a personal Google or Microsoft calendar so your Zimun appointments appear there automatically, and so your external busy time blocks Zimun availability. The connection is per team member: each person links their own calendar; nobody connects on behalf of someone else. The feature is available on Pro and Advanced plans, and the organization owner turns it on for the whole org before any member can connect.
Use external calendar sync when staff keep another calendar of record — clinic Outlook, personal Google — and double bookings have crept in because Zimun did not know about that other busy time. Connecting once removes the gap: Zimun appointments push outward to the chosen calendar, and external busy events pull inward to reduce bookable slots for that member.
1. Turn on the organization toggle (owner)
Open Settings → Organization → Preferences. As the owner, turn on "Enable external calendar sync". Until you do, the External calendar tab does not appear on any team member's edit page, no inbound busy import affects availability, and no outbound export runs.
Turning the toggle off again pauses sync for every connected member without deleting their stored tokens. If you turn it back on, valid connections resume; expired ones surface a reconnect prompt to that member.
2. Connect your own calendar (member)
Open Settings → Team and find your own member card. Open Edit. A new "External calendar" tab appears next to Profile / Services / Schedule. Pick the provider (Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook) and follow the consent screen.
After consent, you land back on the same tab with a confirmation strip showing the provider, the chosen calendar, and "Last sync" timestamps. The connect chips are replaced by a Disconnect button. If the provider exposes multiple calendars, the connection defaults to your primary calendar.
Owners and administrators cannot connect on behalf of another member. The External calendar tab only appears when you are editing your own member record — anyone else editing your record sees the other three tabs only.
3. What gets exported (Zimun → external)
Every Zimun appointment assigned to you exports to the connected calendar as a regular event. Create, reschedule, and cancel propagate within a normal sync delay: a few seconds in the common case, longer if the provider is rate-limiting.
Only appointments that count as busy in Zimun export. Cancelled appointments are removed (or marked as such) on the external side. Status changes that do not move the time — marking attendance, starting, ending — do not re-write the external event in this release.
4. What gets imported (external → Zimun)
A background sync job (the same cron that fires for every connected org) reads your external calendar on a rolling window and stores each non-free event as a busy block on your Zimun member record. Public booking, the API, the chat agent, and the operator schedule all consult those busy blocks alongside Zimun appointments when computing availability.
Imported busy blocks affect only you. A personal lunch in your Google Calendar reduces your own slots; it does not block teammates on the same service. Declined invitations and events marked free are skipped.
5. How external busy appears on the schedule
On the operator schedule view, external busy blocks render as a striped background stripe with an "External busy" label. Owners and administrators see them for any member in their location scope; you see your own blocks on your own view. The block is non-bookable but does not act like a Zimun appointment — you cannot click it, reschedule it from inside Zimun, or change its content.
Customers booking publicly see nothing about the external calendar source — they just see fewer available slots when you are externally busy, the same way they would for a Zimun appointment on your calendar.
6. Disconnect and reconnect
Use the Disconnect button on the External calendar tab to stop future sync. Future Zimun appointments stop exporting and external busy stops importing. Historical exported events stay in your external calendar; they are not retroactively deleted.
If your OAuth token expires (Google and Microsoft both rotate tokens on a schedule), the tab shows a "Reconnect to resume sync" prompt. Reconnect with the same provider — the existing event mapping is preserved so you do not see duplicate calendar entries after the reconnect.
7. Troubleshooting
- Connect chips are missing from your team-edit page: either the organization toggle is off (ask the owner), your plan does not include external calendar sync (Free tier), or you are editing someone else's record (open your own).
- Zimun appointment did not appear in your external calendar: refresh the external calendar app — the sync runs in the background; immediate appearance is not guaranteed. If it still does not appear after several minutes, check "Last outbound sync" on the tab for the latest attempt timestamp and any error message.
- Available slots disappeared after connecting: that is the expected behaviour — busy time from your external calendar now blocks Zimun slots. Move or delete the external event to reopen the slot, or untick the Disconnect button to stop imports.
- Customer says they cannot find your earlier availability: external busy blocks affect every booking surface (public page, API, chat agent). Check your external calendar for personal events overlapping the time the customer wants.
8. Plan requirement
External calendar sync is available on Pro and Advanced plans. On Free, the organization preference is hidden and no member sees the External calendar tab.
Downgrading to Free pauses runtime behaviour without losing stored connections: sync stops, external busy no longer affects availability, no member sees the tab. If you upgrade again later and the connection tokens are still valid, sync resumes; otherwise members reconnect from the tab.
9. Summary
Owner turns on the organization toggle. Each member opens their own team-edit page, clicks the External calendar tab, and connects Google or Microsoft once. From that point Zimun appointments export to their calendar and external busy reduces Zimun availability. Disconnect from the same tab to stop. The feature requires Pro or Advanced; Free hides everything.