If 360 Works goes out of business does our company's Zulu calendar syncing with Google stop working?

[HALBURN]

Can you please explain how your Zulu calendar syncing with Google works? Specifically...if 360 Works goes out of business does our company's Zulu calendar syncing with Google stop working or is there a direct connection between our server and Google?

[joevmartin]

If there were no more software updates to Zulu from this point forward, it would continue to work as long as Google did not shut down Calendar API V3.  There is currently no mention of Calendar API V4, and V3 will probably be good until V5 is released.  So Zulu will work in its current state for a while.

Furthermore, we are a small, but strong company with no intention of going anywhere.  We have been around for almost 20 years, and we plan to be around for much longer.

Zulu is one of our main products and I expect to see continued development on it as long as we are in business.

[HALBURN]

When we first started using Zulu we had some issues getting our events to sync with Google. We were hitting some sort of daily limit and it Google returning an error. Your support person said that they had asked Google to "increase your daily limit" which made it sound like our Zulu server working was in some way dependent on your company. If this is not the case, do you have any idea what your support person might have been referring to when he said that he had asked Google to increase your daily limit?

 

Thanks.

Edited October 8, 2015 by HALBURN

[joevmartin]

We set up a Google Developer Account, which is necessary to leverage the Google Calendar API.  They give you a quota limit, i.e. number of requests you can make per day against their Calendar API.  We had to request and increase to this limit as Zulu began to get close to hitting it.

[Lee Smith]

Multiple post.

I sent you a Private Message on this.

[HALBURN]

We set up a Google Developer Account, which is necessary to leverage the Google Calendar API.  They give you a quota limit, i.e. number of requests you can make per day against their Calendar API.  We had to request and increase to this limit as Zulu began to get close to hitting it.

Hi Joe, so it sounds like our abilty to sync Zulu with Google could be disrupted if something out of our company's control happens to your Google Developer Account...or if one of your other Zulu customers does something that causes your account to exceed your daily account limit. The problem for us is that we are using our calendar to coordinate global travel with over 100 crew members. Whenever our ability to update the calendar gets disrupted this causes a lot of headaches for us. Is it possible for us to use our own Google Developer Account to avoid these potential issues?

[Josh Ormond]

Assuming Google approved the increase, which they likely did...it's a really high number. There are also other ways to mitigate the limit, in which google suggests an "exponential backoff" algorithm. 

While it is true, that something could happen to their developer account that would affect you, the alternative is to develop your API resource and figure out the syncing yourself. There are A LOT of developers using and relying on a Google Developer Account. Usually no big problems.