I’m looking for advice on how to manage calendars in a family context.
Context
I use Nextcloud for my family. My instance has 4 accounts for me, my wife, and 2 children. Each account’s primary calendar is shared with all the others, with me and my wife having edit access for everyone. Finally, I share a public link of my calendar to some friends that make scheduling things together easier.
Problem
Whenever we have shared events where some or all of us are participating, I would like to be able to create an event and invite attendees for whoever the event applies to. This works functionally, but is a visual nightmare, as each event appears on each attendees calendar and crowds out my calendar. For example:
Workarounds
Shared Calendar
I have used a shared family calendar that everyone can see that I’ve used for things that apply to everyone. However, this has the downside of events not appearing in my personal calendar share with my friends. I don’t see a way to include events on multiple calendars, other than copying and pasting them manually. I suppose I could make a separate account (e.g., “Family”, “Admin”) that owns this calendar and invite myself to these events. But that sounds like a prohibitive layer of complexity when setting up device client apps (Android, Thunderbird, etc.)
Single Event Owner
This is how I primarily deal with this issue - assign an event to a single owner (usually myself). This is fine, but then family members have to look at my calendar to see things that they are involved in, and things like event reminders may not come through (usually I turn off reminder for other people’s calendars).
Conclusion
So, I’m really just wondering how other people deal with this. I’m sure I’m not the only one in a family/business setting where people have one-off events between various sets of people. I used to have this problem with Google calendar and remember using some sort of plugin that combined identical calendar events between shared calendars (and did some sort of striped coloring to indicate such). Thanks in advance for any insight you might have!
Awesome! Thanks for sharing about pain you are feeling with your calendars. I see this topic has been unlisted so perhaps the mods consider it to be off topic. But I would love to see more space here for sharing experiences and solutions about the use of nextcloud features.
I’ve been wondering about these types of issues recently as well, but don’t see it specifically as a nextcloud problem. Calendars are notoriously busy and while different calendaring platforms have tried to improve things inevitably you will run into unpleasant overlapping when displaying more than one calendar at a time.
The only real answer on the user level is to actively switch between viewing just your own calendar or a variety of calendars at the same time, by selecting/deselecting them in the sidebar. Nextcloud supports this quite well.
The pain I was feeling recently is related to using nextcloud and mailcow together. I want to use the mailcow calendar as my main calendar, because it is easy to set up and manage on my devices alongside my email and contacts. I want to use the nextcloud scheduler to let people put themselves in my calendar. This works reasonably well together, but I then end up having to copy events from my nextcloud calendar into my mailcow calendar. And I see duplicate calendars in the calendar program on my devices.
I don’t see any simple solution for these types of issues. But I think you’ll be happier if you (and everyone in your family) uses the calendar programs on your devices vs just using the nextcloud web app. That will allow you to add calendars from everywhere you need and the user interface will feel more familiar.
Thanks for the reply!
I see this topic has been unlisted so perhaps the mods consider it to be off topic.
I’m not sure why my post got “unlisted” or what that even means. Mayhaps because I posted a seeming support request in the General category? I didn’t put this under support, because I’m aware of the limitations of Nextcloud and calendar software in general. This was supposed to be more of a discussion.
This works reasonably well together, but I then end up having to copy events from my nextcloud calendar into my mailcow calendar. And I see duplicate calendars in the calendar program on my devices.
This sounds quite painful! Manual copy is the worst 
. I have to do this with a physical calendar in my home, and that is enough for me!
But I think you’ll be happier if you (and everyone in your family) uses the calendar programs on your devices vs just using the nextcloud web app.
Yes, we generally do this. Android for everyone, except me. I use Thunderbird on my work laptop, Outlook on some other machines (corpo environment), and Nextcloud web when I’m on the run. I’ve grown to enjoy using aCalendar+ on my Android devices, thanks to the interleaving of calendar events + tasks.
Well, this topic is in support now! 
Like I said in my PM to you, I don’t know how much appetite there is here for general conversations about using nextcloud. I think that’s unfortunate because there is alot to figure out in nextcloud and it’s not easy to do it by yourself. I set up my digital sovereignty discourse.tobiaseigen.org in part to fill that gap.
Looks like you’re doing some interesting things and you are being very thoughtful about it with your family. Would be nice to see a write up of your experience and the decisions you and everyone in your family have made along the way.
