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Use cases → Scheduling

Place organisation-wide calendar blocker events

Create all-hands or department-wide blockers across every user calendar, ensuring no one can be double-booked during critical periods.

Who it is forIT administrators and operations teams tasked with reserving time across the organisation for events like all-hands meetings or maintenance windows.
APIsCalendar API, Admin SDK
Typical scopescalendar, admin.directory.user.readonly

The problem

Sending calendar invites for large events results in partial coverage—users decline, miss, or delete the invite, and rooms remain bookable. Forcing a true blocker requires direct insertion onto every primary calendar, which only a delegated service account can do at scale.

How it works

  1. Enumerate active users via the Admin SDK to build the target list.
  2. For each user, impersonate their account and insert a 'busy' event directly on their primary calendar using the Calendar API.
  3. Set the event as 'private' and mark it 'busy' to avoid leaking details.
  4. Optionally, remove or update the event after the window passes.

What changes

No user or resource can be booked during the blocked window, and the event appears as a non-optional, unmissable entry in every calendar.

The trap in this one. The Calendar API's batchInsert silently skips calendars where the user is over their quota (e.g., too many events per day), and returns no per-user error unless you check each response. In practice, some calendars will remain unblocked unless you explicitly audit the response for every insertion and retry failures individually.

Questions people ask

Can this override user-declined events?

Yes—direct insert places the event regardless of user RSVP, but users can still manually delete it unless you lock permissions.

What about secondary calendars or shared resources?

You must enumerate and target each explicitly; primary calendar insertion does not affect room/resource availability unless blocked separately.

Want this built?

This is a pattern we run in production. We will set up the delegation and build this on top of it — $500 per hour, most of it working the same day.

Talk to us Or read the setup guide

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