I would love to see an integration with Slate (admissions CRM) so we could pull feeds of admissions events into LW as Linked Calendars. Currently there does not appear to be a way to pull a public-facing iCal feed out of Slate. Slate is used by tons of colleges so I would think this would be a useful feature for many LiveWhale clients! Thanks for considering.
Thanks Jen! I know we have at least one or two schools able to pull ICAL feeds from Slate and use them as LiveWhale Linked Calendars.
If it helps, the syntax I’m seeing used looks something like
https://apply.myschool.edu/manage/event/ical?cmd=feed&identity=xxxxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx&signature=xxxxx
The Slate ICAL out of the box doesn’t contain a ton of info, looks like, but could be a great starting point for getting those admissions events syncing with your LiveWhale Calendar. Hope this helps!
Hey Karl, thanks.
We did try using that exact syntax for a linked calendar but it did not work. We set the Linked Calendar up so event links would go directly to the original event page in Slate, but when I click the event on the LW calendar I’d get a Slate error page saying my email address was not authorized as if I had to have a Slate login to see it. And if I set it up to pull the event info into LW, nothing would come over, I assume for the same authorization reason.
If you don’t mind referring me to the LW clients who may be using it successfully I’d love to chat with them & figure out how they are making it work!
Hmm I see – there’s one currently onboarding school who I think may be having the same issue with Slate (that is, Slate publishing event links that only work for their logged-in users, not the general public). I’ll put a pin in this until we’re able to see if they have any ideas coming from Slate on what’s worked for them.
If anyone else is successfully using Slate feeds in this (or another) way, please chime in! Otherwise we’ll keep tabs on this in the meantime.
We are also interested in this process.
Thanks Paula! We too would be happy for this to work a little smoother for folks – in our experience, you all (as the clients of Slate) often have a better chance at getting a response from their feature or support teams (as opposed to us, who are just a peer vendor). If I were you I’d reach out to your Slate contact and see if it may be possible to get an ICAL feed out of Slate that has more of the details you’re hoping to show on the calendar, without the login-only linked versions.
Or, if anyone working on this wanted to have us check out the Slate-provided feed to see if we might be able to code something to erase the login-only pieces and leave some basic info in the sync, we’re happy to check that kind of project out, you could request an estimate using the Request Help Form. Hope this helps!
Hi folks! @jroupe I wanted to ask you a followup question about this.
It sounds like the feed from Slate was generating events and displaying on the calendar just fine, but when users clicked through to the event they’d be asked for login info on the Slate side. Is that accurate?
I was wondering if you’d tried just pointing the event to a calendar detail page and not to Slate? Then the login wouldn’t be necessary. (I know the feed might not provide much in the way of event details; one thing some of our clients do is create a customized description for all the events in a feed like that with instructions to visit Slate for more info.)
If you’ve already resolved this issue some other way, that’d be great to know too. Hope you’re doing well.
Hi @jason - It has been a few months but yes what you describe is what was happening, the linked calendar feed was pulling events into LW but if we tried to auto-link them to the Slate event, or even pull the Slate event details over, we got errors. Right now our admissions office is just recreating all of the events in Live Whale and manually adding a link to the Slate event details/registration page in the description. They are making it work but a linked calendar feed that did that automatically would obviously save some time, so if that is ever figured out please let us know!
Thanks Jen!
I sure don’t like the idea of you re-entering information. As Karl notes:
In our experience, you all (as the clients of Slate) often have a better chance at getting a response from their feature or support teams (as opposed to us, who are just a peer vendor). If I were you I’d reach out to your Slate contact and see if it may be possible to get an ICAL feed out of Slate that has more of the details you’re hoping to show on the calendar, without the login-only linked versions.
It sounds like there might be some room to make this work with a more serious integration with the Slate API; if you wanted to make a small project out of that, I’m sure we’d be happy to do some research into the full range of possibilities. In the meantime there’s always the possibility of a sort of hybrid approach, something like this:
- A Linked Calendar pulls events from Slate as Hidden
- Admissions staff edit and customize individual events from the linked calendar, adding the descriptions/details that aren’t included in the Slate feed, and save as Live
That might lessen the duplicative effort? At any rate, if you’d like to have us take a shot at a deeper Slate API integration, just drop a line to support. Thanks!