Introducing a concept of "searchable and viewable calendars"

[schiessle]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

At Nextcloud we are used to that everyone shares their calendar with everyone. This makes it easy to coordinate appointments with external people if I can quickly lookup the calendar of a colleague. Having the option to enable additional calendars of your colleagues and having a joint few makes it easier to find empty slots that work for everyone than the "free-busy" feature. Especially if I don't want to setup a meeting but just want to tell someone else which dates should work for a meeting. Also it is sometimes helpful if I can search for a specific event in a calendar of a colleague.

But with the growth of Nextcloud this comes to a limit. The number of shared calendars gets more and more, caldav sync becomes bigger and bigger and they also "spam" other stuff like the task app, etc.

Describe the solution you'd like

My idea: Have a concept similar to Talk rooms which are searchable for logged in users. This would mean people could search for my calendar and look into it if needed and afterwards close it again without having it permanently shared.

As a additional feature we could distinguish between making it searchable/viewable with all details (so that I really see all entries) and a "privacy" mode where I only see the appointments in the calendar without a title and without all the other details like description, location, etc. But this would be a nice to have addition when we reached the first step.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[nursoda]

I'm waiting for such a feature for a long time now. There are tickets and forum discussions about it, often in the context of "free/busy". Personally, I'm currently using Appointments as a workaround, since my customers must be able to schedule meetings with THEIR internal (exchange) contacts AND myself. My use case would be the above mentioned "privacy mode", but "shared". That way, I could provide a much easier to read view to my customers.

[schiessle]

additional note: ideally the "privacy" option would be a per-event setting. Some things I want people to see, e.g. joint events, meetings,... other are really private e.g. a blocker because of a doctor appointment.

[jancborchardt]

@schiessle FYI for your core ask this seems a very related issue / problem solution proposal :) nextcloud/server#44776 (comment)

As you said:

makes it easier to find empty slots that work for everyone than the "free-busy" feature