Backbuild Calendar: Scheduling in the Backbuild Workspace

Backbuild Calendar is the calendar and scheduling app built into the Backbuild workspace. You plan your day in the view you prefer, invite guests, set recurring events, and overlay the calendars your teammates share with you. This page covers what Backbuild Calendar does today, how your events are stored and protected, and what it does not do yet.

Calendar, on Every Plan

Calendar is included on every Backbuild plan, including Free, the same way Mail, Docs, Sheets, and Contacts are. There is no separate calendar subscription and no add-on. Current plan allowances are listed on the pricing page. Because it lives inside the workspace, an event, a document, and a message all share one identity and one set of roles, and the people you schedule with are the same contacts you email.

Views for the Way You Plan

Backbuild Calendar renders your schedule in the view that fits the task. Day and Week give you a time grid with events laid out by hour, Month gives you the familiar wall-calendar grid, Year gives you the whole span at a glance, Schedule gives you an agenda list of what is coming, and a 4-day view sits between a day and a week. You move forward and back through time, jump to today, and click any slot to start a new event.

Day, Week, Month, Year, and Schedule views, plus a 4-day view.
A mini-month navigator for jumping to any date quickly.
Click a slot to create an event, and open an event to change its time.

Events, Guests, and Invitations

An event carries everything you expect: a title, a time or an all-day span, a location, a description, a color, and a calendar it belongs to. You add guests by email and they are listed on the event. When you create an event with a Backbuild meeting, each guest is emailed an invitation with a standard calendar attachment, so it lands correctly in whatever calendar they use. Replying from the event, and seeing guests' replies on it, are not available yet.

Guests and invitations: add attendees by email; an event created with a Backbuild meeting emails each of them a standards-based invitation.
All-day and timed events, with a location, description, and color.
Backbuild Meet: Add Backbuild Meet puts a meeting on the event, and its join link travels on the invitation.

Recurring Events

Backbuild Calendar supports recurring events with the standard recurrence rules, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and the common patterns in between. When you edit a recurring event, it asks the question every calendar user knows: apply the change to this event only, to this and all following events, or to the whole series. Individual occurrences can be moved or changed without breaking the rest of the series.

Reminders

An event can carry a reminder, set from 5 minutes to 1 day before it starts, and the reminder is saved with the event. Reminder notifications are not delivered yet, so no notification fires before the event.

Multiple Calendars and Sharing

Your primary calendar and the calendars shared with you sit in one grid, each with its own color, and you turn them on and off in the view; more calendars of your own, such as one per project, are created through the REST API today. Sharing is built on granular access: a person can be given the ability to see only that you are busy, to see full event details, to make changes, or to manage the calendar. Calendars shared to you appear under Other calendars, ready to overlay. The full model, and which sharing actions are available in the app today versus through the API, is in Calendars, Sharing, and Find a Time.

Many calendars, each with its own color and visibility toggle.
Four access tiers: free-busy only, see details, make changes, or manage.
Follow shared calendars: calendars shared to you appear under Other calendars to overlay and read.

Free-Busy

When you are scheduling across people, overlay the calendars they share with you at the free-busy tier: the grid shows their busy blocks without the private details of their events, so an open slot across all of them is a time that works. A screen that lines up several people's availability for you is not in the app yet. From code, a free-busy query through the REST API returns only busy or free across the calendars or members you name, never the contents of a private event you are not allowed to see.

Time Zones and a World Clock

Times are shown in your device's time zone, and you can display up to five labeled time-zone columns down the side of the day and week grids, so a meeting reads correctly in both your zone and a colleague's.

Sync With Other Calendars

Sync between Backbuild Calendar and Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, or an Apple or CalDAV calendar is not available yet: no events move between them in either direction. Calendar settings shows a Connected calendars panel with buttons to connect those accounts, but a connected account does not sync, so keep using your existing calendar alongside Backbuild Calendar for now. Invitations you send from Backbuild Calendar still land in whatever calendar your guests use. See Calendar Sync.

Your Schedule Is Portable

Your calendar is yours to move. The whole calendar is readable through the Backbuild REST API, so your events are never trapped in one place. The invitations an event with a Backbuild meeting sends are standards-based email with a calendar attachment, so they land correctly in whatever calendar the recipient uses.

A Live, Multi-Device Calendar

Your calendar is a single live object shared by every device you sign in from. An event created on your laptop appears on your other open sessions in real time, so your devices never disagree about your day. You use Backbuild Calendar through the Backbuild web app and the Backbuild desktop app for Windows and macOS.

How Your Events Are Stored and Protected

Event visibility is server-authoritative. When you look at a calendar you have only free-busy access to, the server sends back plain busy blocks, and the screen renders exactly that, it never receives and then hides the private details, so there is nothing on the client to reconstruct. The same holds for an event marked Private on a calendar someone can read in detail: unless they are on the event or can edit the calendar, they get a busy block, and that rule is applied to each occurrence of a recurring series on its own and to every calendar search, so a search never matches words in an event hidden from the searcher. Every read and write is authorized against your identity and your organization's roles, and changes are recorded in an append-only audit trail. Data is encrypted in transit over TLS and at rest, and each organization's calendars are isolated from every other organization's. Role-based access control and audit logging are on every plan, including Free.

What Backbuild Calendar Does Not Do Yet

Being straight about the edges matters. A few capabilities are not available today, and you should weigh them before you switch:

Appointment booking pages (a public page where people book a slot with you) are on the roadmap and marked as coming soon on the pricing page.
Extra event types beyond a standard event, a task, an out-of-office block, focus time, a working-location entry, and an appointment schedule, are coming soon.
Video meetings with people outside your organization are not available yet. An event can carry a Backbuild meeting through Add Backbuild Meet, and your teammates join with the button on the invitation; people outside your organization cannot join by link yet.
A subscribable calendar feed (a read-only URL another app follows) is not usable yet.
Reminder notifications are not delivered yet; a reminder you set is saved with the event, but no notification fires.
Replies on the event are not available yet: guests cannot answer from the event, and their replies are not shown on it. A reply sent from a guest's own calendar arrives in the organizer's mailbox as an email.
A find-a-time screen that lines up several people's availability is not in the app yet; overlay their free-busy calendars instead.
Sync with Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, or an Apple or CalDAV calendar is not available yet.
Creating, deleting, or recoloring a calendar in the app is not available yet; more calendars of your own are created through the REST API.
Native mobile apps are not available yet, so today you use Backbuild Calendar through the web app and the Windows and macOS desktop app.
Offline access is not available today; Backbuild Calendar needs a connection.
Automatic event creation from email (adding a flight or reservation to your calendar from a message automatically) is not a feature today.

Where Backbuild Calendar Fits

Backbuild Calendar is the right choice when you want a calendar with recurring events, guests and meeting invitations, multiple calendars and sharing, free-busy visibility, and world-clock time zones, that lives in the same workspace as your mail, contacts, documents, and sheets, and is free on every plan. It is not the right choice today when your hard requirement is a public appointment booking page, sync with another calendar, reminder notifications, replies tracked on the event, video meetings with people outside your organization, a store-installed mobile app, or offline access.

For step-by-step guides, start with the Backbuild Calendar documentation: the views and event editor, recurring events, guests, and reminders, calendars, sharing, and find a time, settings and time zones, and calendar sync.