Google-calendar – Repeating event for Saturday following the 2nd Tuesday in Google Calendar

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Happy Patch Tuesday everyone. For those who don't know, Patch Tuesday is the 2nd Tuesday of each month, when Microsoft (and now supposedly also Adobe) release their security patches each month. I'm the network administrator for a small college, and one of the things we do here is a have a planned maintenance window on the Saturday following Patch Tuesday each month, so that we can apply the new updates to our servers and restart them.

We use Google Apps for Education for our e-mail and calendar here, and I would like to put a recurring event in our public IT calendar that corresponds to this maintenance window. Unfortunately, I can't find a way to do it. I can do a 2nd Tuesday event easily enough, but the Saturday following is killing me — sometimes it's the 2nd Saturday, and sometimes it's the 3rd.

Any ideas?

Best Answer

Although Google Calendar doesn't allow you to create or modify arbitrary recurrence rules like "Saturday after second Tuesday", the iCalendar specification which it uses and understands is quite robust in this regard. Simply create a *.ics file for the event with a custom recurrence rule or RRULE.

For your example, note that since the second Tuesday of a month falls, by definition, between the 8th and the 14th (inclusive), the Saturday which follows four days after it must fall between the 12th and the 18th (inclusive). So for a four-hour monthly maintenance window event from 3am to 7am, you'll want something like:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20130112T030000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20130112T070000
RRULE:FREQ=MONTHLY;BYDAY=SA;BYMONTHDAY=12,13,14,15,16,17,18
DESCRIPTION:
LOCATION:
SEQUENCE:0
STATUS:CONFIRMED
SUMMARY:Microsoft Security Patch Maintenance Window
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

To import the *.ics file: In the left-hand list of "My Calendars", click "Settings", then "Import Calendar" link. You can specify which calendar you'd like to import the event to, but you won't be able to edit its recurrence rule from within Google Calendar, aside from deleting the event and reimporting it.

If this helps, you may wish to read more about the flexibility offered by custom recurrence rules in the iCalendar specification.

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