Help and support
Ownership and security
TeamCal is built, hosted and maintained by TeamCal.us, and is available by invitation only. Each team gets its own private TeamCal, with its own address and its own database, so no one outside your team has an account in your team's calendar.
Ownership
- Application: TeamCal + Dashboard, written and maintained by Dan Knudsen at TeamCal.us.
- Domain: the web address is on teamcal.us, a domain owned by Dan Knudsen.
- Hosting: a private web hosting account owned by Dan Knudsen. The application and its database run together there, and each team's install is kept in its own folder with its own database. As with any hosted website, the hosting company runs the physical server and passes on the site's outgoing email; it has no account in TeamCal.
- Source code: kept in a private repository controlled by Dan Knudsen. It contains program code only, never calendar data, sign-ins or settings.
Who can get in
- Only people an Owner or Admin adds can sign in, each with their own work email and password. The wall display uses one shared sign-in that can only view (and, if an Admin allows it, add) events.
- There are no public pages with calendar data. The only way to view the calendar without a sign-in is the embed link, a secret address an Admin can place on a company intranet page and replace at any time.
- Search engines are told not to index any page.
How it is protected
- Every connection is encrypted (HTTPS), and browsers are told never to use an unencrypted connection.
- Passwords are stored only as one-way hashes, so nobody, including administrators, can read them. Repeated wrong passwords pause that sign-in for 15 minutes.
- Emailed password links work once and expire (7 days for a welcome link, 2 hours for a reset). Changing a password signs out every other device.
- The database, backups and server settings are kept in folders the web server refuses to serve, and each page tells the browser which sources it may load, which blocks injected scripts.
- Every change to an event records who made it, and deleted events can be restored for 30 days.
What leaves the server
Calendar data never leaves TeamCal's server on its own. The only outside connections are for public weather and map information, and for email:
| Connection | What it is for | What it receives |
|---|---|---|
| US National Weather Service (weather.gov) | Forecast and weather alerts | The map location of the site. Requested by TeamCal's server, so the weather service never sees the people using it. |
| Iowa Environmental Mesonet, Iowa State University | Radar pictures (from the National Weather Service radar network) | Only which part of the map to send. Requested by TeamCal's server, never by the dashboard. |
| OpenFreeMap | The street map under the radar | The dashboard's browser loads the map pictures directly, so the map service sees that computer's internet address and the area of the map shown, as with any online map. No calendar data, names or sign-ins. |
| Windy.com (backup radar only) | Shown only if TeamCal's own radar is unavailable, or if an Admin chooses it | Loaded directly by the dashboard's browser, which shares its internet address and the map location. Windy may set its own cookies. |
| Google Workspace mail for teamcal.us (or, if not set up, the hosting company's mail server) | Password links, contact form messages and the optional daily backup email | The content of each email and its recipient. Emails then travel by normal email to the address they are sent to. teamcal.us's mail service belongs to Dan Knudsen. |
| Your own calendar app (only if you subscribe) | Showing the team calendar in Outlook or on a phone | Your calendar provider fetches your private feed and keeps a copy of the events. Subscribe from your company account; see Outlook, Google and phones. |
The fonts that can be chosen for notes, emails and the dashboard are copies of Google Fonts kept on TeamCal's own server, so no page ever contacts Google or another font service.
There is no advertising, analytics, tracking or usage reporting of any kind, and no information is sold or shared.
Questions
Questions about how TeamCal is owned, hosted or secured are welcome. Use the contact form.