Calendar integration

Last edited: October 30, 2024

Overview

Connect your Google Calendar to import calendar events to Tana.

Easily take notes on all your video calls that are synced from your calendar using the Meeting agent

The connection is a one-way sync. Changes you make in Google Calendar will sync to Tana, but not vice versa

Calendar sync is an exclusive Tana Core feature. It uses AI to classify incoming events, which is only available on Tana Core.

Basics

• Initial setup: When you sign up for a trial or upgrade to Tana Core, you will have the opportunity to connect your Google Calendar with Tana. It can be a different account than the one you use to log in to Tana.
• See events on daily notes page: By default we create a Related content section on your daily notes page where you will see all the synced events for the day. Click on events to zoom into them and take notes (or send your meeting agent, see below)
• Open events to schedule/send the Meeting agent to the meeting: When a synced meeting has a Meeting link (Zoom, Google Meet... Coming soon: Teams), you can send a Meeting agent to take notes for you during the meeting. For more on that, see Meeting agent.
• Your calendar data gets enriched with each meeting: When we sync your contacts to Tana, they all get tagged with #person. With every meeting you have with them attending, the Meeting agent can help you remember things they said about themselves by adding these facts under Background info. As you have more meetings, your CRM is basically making itself.

Detail

The synergy between the Calendar integration and Meeting agent

The Meeting agent and Calendar integration are two intertwined features that are meant to work together.

The calendar integration is not just a convenient way to see your events on the day node. It is an opportunity for AI to help build out your knowledge graph:

• It syncs your meetings to Tana so you have a place to prepare for meetings, write notes and agenda points beforehand
• A meeting agent uses AI to attend and take notes during the meeting for you
• All notes are saved back in Tana on the meeting node, and connects back to your knowledge base.

When the Meeting agent creates notes, it does the following:

Writes a concise, interconnected meeting summary: Your meeting summaries are no longer siloed on a different AI transcription platform just for meeting notes. They now live in Tana with the rest of your knowledge, connected to things in the transcript and in your graph.

Creates action items based on the conversation: It picks up all the tasks, agenda items and decisions that come out of a meeting

Adds new items to your knowledge base: Things will get mentioned in meetings that you don't have an existing node for. AI detects cities, states and countries, and will add them to your graph as references wherever they are mentioned. It also detects products (like "ChatGPT") and companies (like "OpenAI").

Builds a CRM: Meetings usually have Attendees. By syncing your contacts, AI can enrich the information on these contacts with facts that it learns from meetings. Joanne is not just a generic contact in your CRM anymore, they went golfing last weekend with their husband and really enjoy a good Pinot Noir (good to know when getting a birthday gift).

Go here for more on the Meeting agent.

Initial setup

Grant Google authorization

• When you start the setup, you will be asked for a separate authorization for the Google Calendar integration. Note: You can use a different account than your Tana account for calendar sync.
• Checking the boxes grants Tana permission to access calendar events and contacts, nothing else. We recommend checking all the boxes for the calendar integration to work properly.
• Then, select which calendar you want to sync.
• Once you're through the flow, your Google calendar will be ready to do an initial sync.
• Tana will sync one week of events at the time. The sync will also trigger when you navigate to days that haven’t been synced yet.

Google Calendar configuration

• To change anything about the configuration of the calendar later, you can go to Settings > Google Calendar settings
• For more on that, see Calendar settings

What gets synced from the calendar, and where do they go

Two nodes are created in the Library: Google Calendar Events and Google Calendar Contacts. We don't encourage users to go here often, this is just the place where things are stored. To change target nodes for people and events being synced, see Calendar settings

The integration is a one-way sync

This means that some content coming from the sync cannot be edited by the users. If they are changed, the next sync will overwrite this with the existing information from the calendar. This means that any changes to events need to happen in Google Calendar, not in Tana.

Here's a list of information coming from Google that is mapped to the corresponding Tana calendar sync settings. See below for the full list. These would be not editable in Tana due to their Google Calendar counterparts updating them regularly:

• ["Google term"] -> [Tana calendar config term]
• "Summary" -> Node name
• Start/End time -> Date field (user field)
• Attendees -> Attendees field (user field)
• HTML link -> Calendar link (system field)
• Conference Link -> Event meet link URL (user field)
• Description -> Event details (user field)
• Status -> Event status (system field)

The Google Calendar Contacts node

All contacts that are part of the invite list of an event are added here

By default, a person looks like this:

The Google Calendar Events node

All events are added here

By default, an event looks like this:

Changing the names of events

Event names are locked because the names are directly tied to Google Calendar. To change the name of the meeting, change it in Google Calendar, or use a title expression on the #meeting tag to override it.

Recurring events

Recurring events have a special identifier so Tana knows which events happened previously or are upcoming for the series. These can be found in the Related content section on the meeting node:

Events on your daily notes page

On a default Tana Core setup, the calendar events of the day will show up on your daily notes page as a search node in Agenda, a related content section. If you want to learn more about how this works, see Related content.

On this page, the Configure calendar sync option in the three-dotted menu on your daily notes navigation takes you to the Google Calendar settings:

Triggering sync

Tana syncs new events from your calendar within set intervals. If you know a new event in your calendar hasn't shown up in Tana yet, you can manually force a refresh by running the command Force calendar sync on the title of the day/week node.

Calendar settings

The calendar settings give you the option to change which calendars are being synced from your Google account, which fields are used to map information from Google to Tana, and which supertags to use to classify events with.

How to get to Calendar settings

Go to Settings, then Google Calendar settings:

General config

Here you can choose which calendars you want to sync to Tana. You can also disconnect your calendar connection with Tana.

Classification of events

When events are imported into Tana, they can be given a specific supertag according to the type of event it is.

Here's a detailed description of what each of them means:

Note: These classes can currently not be changed, or added to.

You can specify which tag to apply for that kind of event ("Tags to set"), and you can set a command that will trigger whenever this event is identified ("On classified").

Advanced

—Target configuration

Setting an event and contacts target ensures that when they're created, they get saved in that target location.

There are a number of restrictions on where you can save Event and Contact nodes. If you decide to choose another target, there will be some warning messages to guide you.

—Raw configuration

If you need to change a field or supertag that the calendar sync uses to populate Tana events, this is where you would do it. There's a lot of raw config exposed, so tread carefully when making changes.

Note: You'll see supertag definitions and field definitions in the config. This is a reminder that they look like this, respectively:

Enabled Calendars: Shows the calendars that are being synced. Your personal calendar is usually shown as an email.

Attendees field: The field in your meeting tag where attendees will be listed, if any. Default name: Attendees

Attendee supertag: When attendees are downloaded from an event, Tana will try to match them to instances of this supertag using their email. Default name: person

Attendee email field: The email field of the Attendee supertag that Tana will match incoming event attendees with. Default name: Email

Date field: The field used to store the date and time of the event. Default name: Date

Event URL field: The field used to store the link to the original calendar event. Default name: Calendar Link

Event details field: The field that stores the details/description of an event. Default name: Action items

Event status field: The field that stores the status of the event. Possible status options: Tentative, Confirmed, Cancelled, Declined. Default name: Event Status

Event classification config: Same as Classification of events

Event Destination: Same as Target configuration

Contacts Destination: Same as Target configuration

Other calendar services

The calendar sync is currently only available for Google Calendar. We hope to expand on these offerings in the future.

Multiple calendar sync

We do not support syncing multiple calendar accounts to Tana at the moment. There is a workaround where you can have other calendars sync to a single Google Calendar account, so they appear in Tana. For instructions on this, see Can I sync multiple calendars to Tana?