How to configure Google Calendar 2-way sync with MBC booking software

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With Google Synchronization, all Providers employees can sync their working schedule with their Google Calendar. Each appointment booked will be added to their Google calendar with the customer added as a participant.

If Employee already has events in the Google calendar marked as busy, those will not be available for booking in MBC system – this will prevent overbooking. Rescheduling, canceling, or deleting the appointment needs to be done in MBC system. Suppose you reschedule the appointment in Google Calendar. In that case, that will not reflect in MBC system, but if you reschedule the appointment in MBC system, it will be updated in Google Calendar as well.

Client ID and Client Secret

Before you can integrate Amelia with Google Calendars, you must create a “Client ID” and “Client Secret”.

Go to the Google Developers Console.
Click on “Select a project”, or if you have some other projects active, simply click on the drop-down to create a new project.

In a new window that appears, click on “NEW PROJECT” in the top right:

Enter the project name, select “No organization” and click on “CREATE”:

Please note: If you’re using your business account (G-Suite), you do need to select your organization and the location associated with it. All other steps remain the same.

You will see the project is being created in the top right, and when it is created you will see a notification similar to what you can see here:

You need to click on “Select Project“, for this project to be selected. After you do this, you will be taken to the Project’s dashboard:

From the left-hand side menu, select “Library“:

Search for the Google Calendar API on the next screen:

You will see two results. Click on “Google Calendar API“

Next, click on the “Enable” button.

When the API is enabled, you will see its “Overview” screen. Click on the “Create Credentials“ button on the far right.

This will open the “Credentials” window. There you need to select:

Google Calendar API;
User data;
Click on “Next”.

When you click on “Next”, step 2 will open up, where you need to provide the “Name” of the App; select the email in the “User support mail” dropdown, and provide the email of the App developer (this is usually the same email as the “User support mail”):

After you’re done, click on “Save and Continue“, below the “Developer contact information”, and skip the remaining steps by clicking on “OAuth Consent Screen” in the left-hand side menu:

In here, the application will already be set as External, and the “Publishing status” should be set to “Testing”, so click on “Publish App” to push to production.

A new modal will pop up, where you need to simply click on “Confirm“:

Now, you can go to “Credentials” in the left-hand side menu, and you will see empty lines for “API Keys”, “OAuth 2.0 Client IDs” and “Service Accounts”.
On the top, click on “+ Create Credentials“

This will open a drop-down, where you need to click on “OAuth client ID“:

Here, from the “Application type”, select “Web application” (1), enter the name of the application (2), and click on “+ Add URI” (3).

A field will appear, where you need to paste the redirect URI, found in Amelia Settings/Integrations/Google Calendar/Redirect URI field. After you paste the URI, click on the “Create” button below.
If you use the front-end Employee panel and want to allow employees to connect their Google calendars from there, you also need to add the full URL of the page where you have the front-end Employee panel, as well. Please make sure to include the whole URL, with the closing ” / ” included, as shown in the screenshot below (“staff-portal” redirect URI).

Please note that with the latest update from Google, your website will need to be HTTPS, and adding URIs with HTTP will not work. Changing the App’s status to “Testing” will cause your employees to disconnect from their connected Google Calendar every day or two, so this is not recommended action.

A new modal will open up, and from there you will need to copy and paste “Your Client ID” and “Your Client Secret” into related fields in the “ MBC system Settings/Integrations/Google Calendar” dialog in MBC system. After that, you or your employee (if the employee has access to the WordPress dashboard) will be able to connect Google Calendar with MBC system from the employee edit dialog.

Connect employees with their Google accounts

Once you’ve completed these settings, there’s one more thing to set on the employees’ side. Each employee should log in to the backend or the front-end Employee panel and connect to their Google calendar for the synchronization to work. All they need to do is open the Employee dialog (or the My profile page on the Employee panel) and click on the button beside the Google Calendar option. They will then be redirected to choose their Google Account. Once they have chosen it, they will be returned to their profile in the Amelia Plugin with the selected Google Calendar email (if the account is successfully connected the button should change the color from blue to red).

Please visit this page to see how to connect employees with their Google Calendar.

If your employees experience one of the following issues during the connection please configure your security system so that it doesn’t block requests from Google, or click on the browser URL field, delete this part at the end of the URL: “=https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar”, and press Enter.