Calendar - Maps Extension

Google Maps came to improve your Google Calendar with a travel-time feature. Book the time you need to arrive at your next meeting and realize if the time between appointments is enough to be punctual

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Calendar - Maps Extension

Why do this solution?

We use Google Calendar as a basic organization tool in our sales company, during the pandemic period increased the use of Meet for our customer meetings. But now we have a hybrid meeting model and time management is a challenge, because some appointments are online and the next one could be presential. As well, if someone is looking for us for a meeting and sees a "free" space between two reunions, they can schedule a meeting but happens that we are in travel time for the presential appointment but the calendar doesn't reflect it. Also, we can realize at what time we need to leave our current locations to be on time for our event taking into consideration the traffic on the route. With this new feature, the sales team, and the company in general, can plan their schedule better, improving efficiency, as well reducing stress.

What it does

The extension makes a call to the Distance Matrix API when the user sets up the meeting and puts an address, taking into consideration that the extension asked for access to the user's current location. Then it has the option to book the travel time in your calendar to block the space. It also has a button to Waze to get the GPS direction.

How we built it

We use Javascript, HTML, and JSON. From Google Maps We use the APIs Distance Matrix and Geocoding.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was to understand the Google Calendar code and logic, as well as to learn how to use their APIs, so we could add this extension to the events in the best way. This solution can have a lot of improvements but is a very good beginning.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The best accomplishment is to have a functional prototype ready to be used in production.

What we learned

The interface that we see in Google products is so easy and intuitive that we can't imagine the amount of coding that it has behind it to this result. We learned a lot about Calendar APIs and how to blend them with Google Maps APIs to improve the user experience.

What's next for Calendar - Maps Extension

We would like to add a set-up interface, due to the extension needing an API Key. As well, we would improve the calls that make to the Google Maps API to have the best cost/benefit. We would like also to add a change color option to differentiate it from the events. Release it into Google Chrome market place is part of the road map

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