Connecting your Google account
Settings → My Account is where you connect your own Google account to Vianney. Three services are on offer, and you choose which of them to share.
This is personal, not parish-wide. Each staff member connects their own account, sees only their own mail, calendar and tasks, and never a colleague's. There is no parish Google account behind it and no shared inbox.
The three services
- Calendar — your events appear on a person's profile, and you can add an event from Vianney to your own calendar. It writes only to your calendar and sends no invitations.
- Mail — read, compose, reply, archive and bin from the Gmail tab in Messages. It also lets the compose box suggest addresses from your own Google contacts.
- Tasks — two-way sync between My Tasks and your default Google Tasks list. Changes flow both ways.
A lens, never a store
This is the promise the whole feature rests on: Vianney reads your account live and stores none of it. No message bodies, no mailbox copy, no calendar duplicate. When you open the Gmail tab it is your mailbox you are looking at, and when you send from there the mail leaves your account, not the parish's.
The one thing that is saved is the connection itself, and it is held with care — the long-lived key Google issues is encrypted before it ever touches the database, and the short-lived one is minted for a single call and thrown away. Vianney's own record of the connection keeps which Google address and which services, never a token.
Connect it
- 1. Open Settings → My Account.
- 2. Tick the services you want to share. Calendar is ticked by default.
- 3. Click Connect Google. You will sign in at Google and see exactly what is being asked for.
- 4. You land back in Vianney with the granted services shown as small badges beside your Google address.
To add or remove a service later, change the ticks and click Update connection. Google will ask you to confirm again, and adding a service keeps the ones you already granted.
Disconnecting
Disconnect removes Vianney's access immediately. Nothing in your Google account changes — no mail is deleted, no events are removed, no tasks vanish. You can also revoke access from your Google account settings, and Vianney will notice.
When an answer is incomplete, it says so
Reading a mailbox live means depending on Google answering promptly. Vianney gives each lookup a firm time budget rather than holding a page open indefinitely. If it runs out of time before every message is in hand, the result is marked incomplete rather than handed back as though it were the whole story — an incomplete mailbox is never quietly presented as complete.
"Google connections are not enabled on this server yet"
If the My Account card says that, nothing is wrong on your end. The Google services still need their verification finished centrally. The card lights up on its own when they are ready.
Microsoft 365
Outlook Mail, Calendar and To Do — the same three services for parishes on Microsoft — are marked coming soon. The card is there so you can see it is planned, not overlooked.
Tips
- Connecting is optional. Every part of Vianney works without it; the connection only adds your own mail, calendar and tasks alongside parish records.
- If a person has no email address on file, the mail section on their profile simply does not appear — add one to turn it on.
- See also Seeing your Gmail and Calendar on a profile.