How to Sync Starfish Appointments With Outlook, Google and Other External Calendars

Once you have changed your settings you will receive an individual email for each appointment scheduled or cancelled in your calendar.  To add the calendar item to your external calendar simply Accept the calendar.  Starfish allows faculty and staff members to push their Starfish appointments to any external calendars.  To do this, you must enable calendar emails in your Starfish profile.

1. Navigate to Profile >Institutional Profile  Profile is accessed by clicking your name in top right corner.
2. Navigate to Profile>Email Notifications tab
3. Select your preferences for appointment notifications and reminders
4. Click the box in front of “Read busy times from my external Google Calendar” then click the “click here” link after the “Important” message to follow the instructions for getting the address from your Google Calendar settings.  See instructions below.

ar item.  Your institution may have enabled the feature that allows you to cancel appointments from your external calendar.  If so, you can Reject or Cancel the calendar items you receive from Starfish.

External Calendar Integration

Integration with an external calendar allows free/busy information from a staff member’s external calendar to be displayed on that staff members’ Starfish calendar. This type of integration is available for Google or Exchange, and your institution must have configured one of those options with Starfish in order for you to take advantage of it. With Starfish’s adapter installed, Starfish will poll your external calendaring system for shared calendars, and then display the free/busy information from those shared calendars on the corresponding Starfish user’s calendar.

NOTE:  In order for your external calendar’s information to be available to the Starfish adapter, you must set up your Email Notification/ Appointment Notification preferences as described below. 

Configure integration in your profile

1. Select the Email Notifications tab from your Profile menu.
2. If either Google or Exchange integration has been enabled on your Starfish system, just above the Tracking Item Notifications heading a check box labeled:  “Read busy times from my external you will find Google calendar” or “Read busy times from my external Exchange calendar.
3. Check the box and then follow the “Click here” link for set up steps specific to your type of integration

Set your profile to read busy times from Google

After you check the “Ready busy times” box in the Appointment Notifications section of your profile, you must paste your personalized Google Calendar private link into the text box provided. You can use the “Click here” link to find these instructions:

To Get your Google Calendar private link:

1. Open your Google Calendar and click the drop down menu icon to the right of the calendar you want to share.
2. Select the Calendar Settings option
3. Scroll down to the Private Address heading and click the ICAL button to get your private URL.
4. Copy the Private URL provided by Google and paste it to the Google Calendar private link field in your profile’s Email Notification>Appointment Notifications section.
5. Be sure to click the Submit button on your Profile>Email Notifications tab to save changes.

Set your profile to read busy times from Exchange

After you check the “Ready busy times” box in the Appointment Notifications section of your profile, you must share your Outlook (or Microsoft 365) calendar with the starfish email address specified in the line labeled Important under the “Ready busy times” checkbox.

Follow the “Click here” link to find detailed instructions specific to your version of Outlook or Microsoft 365. Generally speaking, you will share your calendar with the email address specified and give it the ability to read “full details”.

External calendar holds on your Starfish calendar

If you have configured Google or Exchange integration as described in the previous section, information from your external calendar will begin to appear on your Starfish calendar. Items from your external calendar will appear as external holds on your Starfish calendar.

An external hold is distinguishable from a Starfish appointment on your Starfish calendar in two ways:

1. The title on the calendar does not include the hyperlink to the student folder.
2. When you click the appointment menu icon the External Hold Menu is displayed rather than the Starfish Appointment Menu.

As noted on the External Hold Menu, this item is editable only in the external calendar.  You cannot edit or cancel this meeting from within Starfish.

External holds will be respected when a calendar owner or manager is adding an appointment or other reserved time to the calendar.  

Time will show as unavailable and appointments will not be able to be added over external holds.