It is possible to migrate events from MeetingMaker 8.8 to Google Calendar. This is done by exporting events from MeetingMaker to an iCalendar or ICal file (.ics), and then importing that into Google Calendar.
There are some limitations:

(error) Private events become public

Private/Public information is lost during export from MeetingMaker. It is also not possible to select either private or public events for export.
This means that all events will be exported as public. You should manually set the events to private in your Google calendar after importing.
By default all staff calendars are shared (read-only) among staff. This means that there will be a short time that other people can see your private events.
If you do not want that, you should unshare your calendar prior to import, and share it again once you finished. This can be done in the Calendars tab in the Calendar Preferences.
If you are importing lots of historic events that include private ones, going through all events will be tedious. A middle-of-the-road strategy would be to make two different exports: one containing all historic events, and import those into a secondary calendar, which you do not share. Then export all future events to your main calendar. This way you will have way less events to adjust.
FYI, I filed a bug report for this issue at MeetingMaker. RFC5455 shows that it is trivial to implement this, it is just a matter of adding CLASS:PRIVATE to each exported private event.

(error) Banners are lost

Banners are not exported at all. You should create events in Google Calendar as events with "Show me as Available".

(error) Event colours are lost

Custom colours on events are lost. Custom colours can only be assigned to an entire calendar.

(warning) Multi-day events become recurring events

If you created an event that spans multiple days, this will be exported as a recurring event that occurs on said days.
You should delete this recurring event, and recreate it in Google Calendar. This is easy because you have the possibility of deleting all of instances of the the recurring event.

(warning) Only works on Windows

Mac users should login on a colleague's PC to export:

  1. Go to File, Export as ICalendar by Date, and pick an appropriate date range
  2. Select Export single file. This should allow you to save a file called MMCalendar.ics.
  3. Log into your Google Calendar
  4. Click Settings, Calendar settings
  5. On the Settgins page, click the Calendars tab
  6. Click the link Import calender
  7. Browse to the MMCalendar.ics file, and select a Google calendar you want to import into (initially there will be only one calendar).

(warning) Importing large calendars gives confusing error

Importing a calendars that contains a large amount of events (typically more than ~200), the import process might end with a tiny window that can only be closed.
This seems to be a cosmetic issue, after closing that box and waiting for a few minutes the events will show up in the calendar.

(warning) Importing ical files might fail

When you try to import an iCal file into your primary calendar, you might receive this error:

Processed 78 events.
Successfully imported 0 events.
Failed to import events: Unable to process your ical/CSV file..

Workaround:

  • Create a secondary calendary
  • Import iCal file into the secondary calendar
  • Export all calendars, this will yield a ZIP file
  • Import the generated iCal file into your primary calendar

It is unclear what causes this, but the symptoms indicate that Google parses iCal differently for primary and secondary calendars.

  • No labels