Secure calendar data: An overview

By default, as soon as you publish a 25Live® calendar, the calendar's events are publicly discoverable through a page hosted on 25livepub.collegenet.com.

If your calendars contain proprietary information and other confidential data that you're providing to a limited group on the internet or on an intranet or secure server, you can take steps during the calendar setup and publishing process that will keep your data private. The steps are described below along with links to detailed how-to information.

I could use an overview of the publishing process.

Topic links

• Secure published calendars with visitor accounts
• Password protect your calendars
• Use secure URLs
• Hide calendar and event actions

Tip You either password protect a calendar or use a secure URL. As described below, the two solutions are useful in different contexts.

Secure published calendars with visitor accounts

You can restrict access to a published calendar to specific email addresses by: 1) requiring visitor account sign in, and then 2) sharing the calendar with just those email addresses that should have access.

To secure a calendar with visitor accounts

1. Ensure that you've enabled visitor accounts for your overall customer account. For more information, go to Customize the Event Actions web app, and then scroll to the Visitor accounts section.
2. In your 25Live account, display your published calendar, and then click Publish Settings.
3. On the Publish Settings tab in the Publishing Control Panel, click Edit Publish Settings.
4. On the Edit Publish Settings page, under Publish Settings, for Access type, click Require visitor account.
5. (Optional) Click Allow all SAML SSO visitor accounts from your organization to allow everyone using your organization's single sign-on (SSO) credentials to access the published calendar, as a group. For more information, go to Single sign-on.



6. Click OK to return to the Publishing Control Panel.
7. Next, share the calendar with just those email addresses that should have access. For more information, go to How to share calendars.

After you've secured your calendar, users who don't first sign in with their visitor account, and users who sign in but don't have sharing permissions set up, won't be able to access the calendar.

Password protect your calendars

Use this option when your events are aimed at a relatively small and diverse group of people who don't all have access to the same securable computing environment.

By password protecting your calendars, you:

• Prevent anyone who doesn't know the password from viewing your events.
• Set the calendar to be unsearchable.

You can password protect a calendar in the process of publishing it.

If you go with password protection, be sure to set a strong password. You can change or cancel the password at any time.

How do I set a calendar's password?

Use secure URLs

Use this option if you're publishing your calendar on a corporate network or other secure computing environment where you can use your organization's computing infrastructure to secure the webpages in which the calendar spuds are embedded.

You can set up a secure URL in the process of publishing your calendar.

Secure URL publishing uses a secure key to generate a unique hash and expiration time for how long the spud code can be used to access a calendar's spuds. This prevents:

• Calendar visitors from copying and sharing the spud code.
• Anyone from viewing the hosted view of your calendar on the 25Live servers.

To use secure URL publishing, you must be proficient with ASP.Net, PHP, or a similar web server scripting language and have access to an environment in which you can build and view pages in a browser.

How do I protect a calendar with a secure URL?

Hide calendar and event actions

By default, published calendars include a variety of calendar and event actions. The intention of the actions is to encourage viewers to attend and share the events they find.

Calendar and event actions in the main calendar view.

However, if you're concerned about data security, you don't want your calendar visitors downloading event feeds, subscribing to calendar emails, adding events to their personal calendars, or sharing events with friends.

To prevent visitors from taking actions, for each secure calendar you publish, you can hide the calendar actions panel and you can hide event actions in both the main calendar and event detail views.

To hide calendar and event actions

Tip These instructions assume that you have already published your calendar using either password protection or a secure URL.

1. In the editing environment, make a secure calendar active, and then click Publish Settings.
2. In the Publishing Control Panel, click the Calendar Spuds tab, and then follow the instructions below:
   • To hide the calendar action panel in all calendar views, under Main Calendar Spud, click Edit Settings & Styles. Click the Calendar Actions Panel tab. Under Styles, for Display, select hide.
   • To hide event actions for each calendar view, under each view, click Edit Settings & Styles. In the Event Actions section, for Event Action display, select None.
   • To hide event actions in the event detail view, under Event Detail View, click Edit Settings & Styles. In the Footer section, for Event Action display, select No for each option you want to hide.

I'd like more information about hiding the actions visitors can take with calendars and events.