Dayn W Creative

Sync Creative Manager Pro events with iCal and Google Calendar

The advertising/creative agency I work with uses a web hosted version Creative Manager Pro, which will soon become Workamajig. Aside from being quite unattractive and difficult to use, one of the biggest disappointments I had when introduced to the CMP system was it’s calendar. Hopefully, the Workamajig transition will change all of this.

I’m a Google Calendar user. I made that decision a couple years back when I needed the ability to have multiple user access to edit calendar events from multiple machines. That criteria also knocked iCal off the list. Since the agency uses CMP, I needed a way to get CMP events into Google Calendar. After searching Google for an answer, I finally contacted CMP support, who pointed me to a help doc. It wasn’t the definitive answer, but some hacking got my CMP events synced with iCal, and eventually Google Calendar.

I should pretext this with a caution. This method only helps you view your events scheduled with CMP. It’s akin to subscribing to CMP’s event stream. If you’re looking to truly sync contacts, tasks, and events with iCal, you’ll want to search “Mac sync” in the CMP help files for an app called CMPSync. There are also extra parameters you can pass detailed in this document to customize your calendar as it enters iCal.

My plan was to get iCal syncing with CMP, then sync Google Calendar with iCal. In iCal, choose “Subscribe” from the top menu. In the “Subscribe To:” field, insert this URL: webcal://app(x).crmgr.com/calendar/ical.aspx?QS=(long code)&Calendars=all

I gleaned the info in the parentheses from the web login link I use for CMP. Check yours for similar info. iCal will ask you for your username and password, which should be the same as your CMP login. Great. That takes care of CMP to iCal.

For the sync between iCal and Google Calendar, I used Spanning Sync. For $25/yr or $65 one time, Spanning Sync makes sure anything that happens in your iCal also happens in your Google Calendar.

There you go. When a CMP event is scheduled, iCal picks it up. Google Calendar dutifully copies anything iCal does, so the event ends up in Google Calendar.

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May 5th, 2008