Google Apps (now known as G Suite but I refuse to say those words cause it makes me think of Vanilla Ice) and Gmail give you some amazing tools for very little cost and in Gmail’s case FREE. I have used both services since they started and have encouraged anyone else to do the same. They just work.
However there are two consistently annoying aspects of the Calendar tool that, until today, have annoyed me since the beginning. Both of these have to do with creating an Event and sharing them with other people. The huge benefit of Google Calendar is that you can create an event in your calendar and then share that with other people so that it is in their calendar.
Video Calls for Everyone!
The first annoyance is the video call ‘feature’ that Google has on by default.
I guess this is there attempt to promote their Google Plus video hangout service. It mostly serves to confuse people. When they click the video call link thinking there is a video call when it is just a regular phone call. It gets even more confusing when the meeting is in person. “Jenkins, why did you setup a video call for our in-person meeting?”
Danger Will Robinson! External Invitation!
The second annoyance is when adding people to an event who have an email address from outside your company’s Google Apps. When you do this Google pops up a warning: “The following attendees are from outside your organization.
Are you sure you would like to invite them?”
Well let’s see here Google. I just entered that email into the event invitation because I wanted to invite them to the event. So yeah I guess I want to invite them to the event but thanks for making sure I didn’t make that mistake.
For over a decade now I have put up with these settings never thinking that I might be able to turn them off. After getting off a call with a client today where there was confusion about the Video Call button on the invite I Googled
- Sign in to the Google Admin console.
- Click Apps > G Suite > Calendar.
- Click Sharing settings.
- Under Video Calls, uncheck Automatically add video calls to events created by a user.
When you get to the Sharing settings you will also see a check-box for the external invite alert allowing you to disable that ‘feature’ as well.
Of course Google being Google it may take up to 24 hours for this change to take effect.