Zimun can read the busy times from your Google Calendar and block your availability to match. You paste your calendar's secret address once; Zimun refreshes it every 15 minutes and imports only the times of your events — never titles, descriptions, or attendees. From then on, a dentist appointment in your Google Calendar closes the overlapping Zimun slots the same way a Zimun appointment would. Customers simply see fewer available slots; nobody sees why.
This covers one direction: outside events blocking Zimun. For the other direction — seeing your Zimun appointments inside Google Calendar — subscribe to your Zimun calendar feed from Settings → Calendar feed. The two links together give you two-way visibility without connecting any accounts.
1. Find your calendar's secret address
- Open Google Calendar in a web browser.
- Click the gear icon in the top right and choose Settings.
- In the left column, under "Settings for my calendars", click the name of the calendar you want Zimun to read. (Shortcut from the main screen: hover the calendar in the left-hand list, click the three dots, and choose "Settings and sharing".)
- Scroll to the "Integrate calendar" section.
- Copy the "Secret address in iCal format" — a long URL that starts with https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/ and ends in basic.ics.
Use the secret address, not the public one: the secret address works without making your calendar public.
One thing to know before you leave this screen: the Reset button next to the secret address invalidates the old address everywhere it is used — including in Zimun. Only click it on purpose, and if you do, copy the new address and paste it into Zimun again.
2. Paste the address into Zimun
- In Zimun, open Settings → Team and open your own record. The External calendar tab appears only on your own record — nobody can paste an address on your behalf, and you cannot paste one for a teammate.
- On the External calendar tab, paste the address into the calendar address field and save.
- Zimun fetches the feed once, right away, and answers with "Events found in the next 14 days: N."
That message is your confirmation: the address works and Zimun could read the calendar. The number counts events in the 14-day window Zimun watches — a count of 0 is not an error if your next two weeks happen to be empty. If the check fails instead, the message states the problem and nothing is saved; fix the address and try again.
Once connected, the tab shows the address masked, a "Last refreshed" timestamp, and a Remove button. Remove stops the import and deletes every busy block the feed created.
3. How fresh the import is
Zimun refreshes the feed every 15 minutes; "Last refreshed" on the External calendar tab shows the most recent run. Google keeps the secret address close to current, so in practice a new event in your Google Calendar blocks your Zimun availability within about a quarter of an hour.
4. Keep the address private
The ICS address of your calendar grants full read access to that calendar to anyone who holds it — treat it like a password. Zimun stores the address encrypted, shows it only in masked form, and keeps only busy times from your calendar: the start and end of busy slots, never titles, descriptions, or attendees. Event contents pass through Zimun's server only transiently during each refresh and are never stored. Removing the feed deletes the address and every imported busy slot.
Connecting a calendar is always each member's own voluntary step: whether and how an organization asks its staff to do so — including any works-council involvement or other employment-law obligations — is the organization's responsibility as employer, not Zimun's.
Do not post the address, and do not send it to anyone you would not hand your calendar to. If you think the address has leaked, click Reset next to the secret address in Google Calendar (the old address stops working immediately) and paste the new one into Zimun.
5. Troubleshooting
- The External calendar tab shows a needs-attention state: the feed has stopped answering. The usual cause is that the secret address was reset in Google Calendar. Copy the current secret address (section 1) and paste it into Zimun again. The state appears only after a couple of hours of failed refresh attempts, so a single network hiccup will not trigger it.
- An event is not blocking your slots: events marked free are skipped on purpose — only busy time blocks availability. Also check the horizon: Zimun watches the next 14 days, so events further out start blocking as they roll into that window.
- Slots disappeared unexpectedly: that is the feature working. All-day events block the whole day, and tentative events count as busy. Move or delete the event in Google Calendar, or remove the feed in Zimun to stop the import entirely.
- The validation check keeps failing: make sure you copied the complete secret address — it is long, and a truncated copy will not fetch.