This was me literally every day over the past year…
My Zoom meeting just starts in 1 minute (I snoozed a minimum of 3 reminders to get to this point).
I spend 2 minutes frantically hunting through my various Outlook or Google Calendars for the invite.
I finally find the invite. I click the link. And…
My browser opens asking if I want to open Zoom. 😩 Yes! Of course I wanted to open Zoom and not my browser!
So I finally decided to figure out how to get all my events into the Zoom app. Here’s how to do it.
Sync All Your Calendars Together
As we’ll see below, Zoom integrates with Google and Outlook to sync your calendar to the Zoom app and it is fairly straightforward — if you only have only one calendar. Zoom only allows you to connect one calendar.
If you have multiple calendars, that is where CalendarBridge comes in. To see Zoom events from across all your calendars in the Zoom app, first sync your calendars to create a consolidated calendar, and then sync that calendar to Zoom. So, for example, Cal Bridge has Zoom events on both his Google and Microsoft calendars:
He uses CalendarBridge to sync the Outlook calendar to the Google calendar:
Sync Your Calendar to Zoom
1. Go to https://zoom.us and login.
2. Click “profile’ from the main menu
3. Scroll down to the “Configure Calendar and Contacts Service” button and click it.
4. Select the type of calendar and click ‘Next’.
5. Select the permissions to grant to Zoom and Click ‘Authorize’ At a minimum, grant Calendar ‘Read” permissions so that Zoom can pull in the events from your calendar. Grant calendar ‘write’ permission if you want to create meetings in the Zoom app and have those events sync back to Google or Outlook (or both if you are syncing them with CalendarBridge).
This will redirect you to the “Login with Google” or “Login with Microsoft” flow where you will grant Zoom the permissions requested based on the boxes checked in the previous step. The screenshots below show the permissions requested to grant Zoom both Read and Write permission of both calendar and contacts.
7. Click “Accept” (Microsoft) or “Allow” (Google).
Now on your Zoom dashboard you should the connected account and permissions granted:
And in the Zoom desktop app, you can now see your meetings for the day:
Simply select the meeting and clock ‘Start’ or ‘Join’ (depending on whether you are the host). No more hunting for links and no more having those links open your browser instead of Zoom!
