In case your end-of-semester meeting calendar was so busy that you didn’t notice, Google recently announced that it will shut down the ability to create new Google Calendar Appointment slots on January 4, 2013. Like me, many faculty may have first learned about online scheduling tools that enable students and colleagues to automatically book appointments from Heather Whitney’s ProfHacker post (July 2011) and follow up (November 2011). [Update: see also December 2012.] Publicly displaying selected blocks of time from my Google Calendar made life much easier for me, and those trying to connect with me, while avoiding those annoying “When are you free?” or “Monday doesn’t work, how about Tuesday?” email exchanges. Many students told me they actually liked the Appointment slots feature as an automated way of making time for in-depth conversation, rather than catching me for a haphazard hallway chat. But what the Google gave, the Google hath taken away, with great disappointment to many disciples. Another popular online appointment scheduler, Tungle, also shut down in December 2012.
Looking around for alternative tools helped clarify which features were most valuable to me. Organizing group meetings is great with Doodle, but its MeetMe personal scheduler did not allow for automatic appointment booking, meaning that I’d need to confirm each individual. Another service, TouchBase.it, integrates a personal scheduling assistant into Google Mail (great for many students), but I could not customize the default 1-hour appointment blocks into smaller units (20-minute blocks seem best for most of my student meetings.) A more sophisticated tool, ScheduleOnce.com, offered the date- and time-specific appointment flexibility I desired, and tempted me with its free 14-day trial offer, but my real cost for automatic booking would be $9 per month. Maybe one of these tools works for you (or your budget), but none satisfied me.
Then I looked back at YouCanBook.Me, a free service that I had initially dismissed as too inflexible, and discovered that it offered all of the features I desired, after I deciphered an obscure phrase in the user interface. Here’s instructions and screenshots on how I’ve customized the settings (with one suggested revision for the developer).
1) Create a YouCanBook.Me account (using your Google login) and walk through the setup pages (accepting defaults, for now) to link to your Google Calendar.
2) Launch the Settings Editor, and under the Basic tab, design your header page.
3) Under the Times tab, click ALL days of the week and hours when you might PLAUSIBLY be available to meet (such as Mon-Fri, 8am-5pm, which we’ll modify soon). On the right side, designate a booking time (mine is 20 minutes). Now for the hidden step: pretend that the field labeled “on duty events” says something more useful, such as “Customize my times to match available Google Calendar events with this phrase.” Insert your exact phrase into the text box (mine is “office hours”).
4) In your Google Calendar, create an event that matches your phrase (“office hours”). Near the bottom, change its default display from show me as “busy” to “available.”
5) In the YouCanBookMe dashboard, publish your booking page online, and share the link and/or embed on your website. Appointment-seekers will see only the available slots that you have designated in your settings.
6) When appointment-seekers select a slot and enter their email address, they receive a confirmation message in their inbox. Updated: Fortunately, YouCanBook.Me does NOT require other users to have a Google Calendar in order to book a slot with you (which is a clear advantage over the old system), but a great feature is that their confirmation email includes a handy link to add the appointment to their Google Calendar if they happen to have one.
7) Here’s the magic: when users book appointments during my office hours slots, it automatically appears in my Google Calendar. Updated: Furthermore, if I manually schedule an appointment for another student during my office hours, it automatically removes that slot from the display of available times (which is a huge improvement over the old Google Calendar Appointment slots).
8) Back inside your YouCanBookMe dashboard, you can manage information fields to be collected in the automatic booking form (I added a spot for appointment-seekers to add the topic they’d like to discuss), along with more advanced display settings. For example, to move the calendar grid from the center of the web page to the left margin, under the “appearance” tab, I inserted this bit of CSS code to override the default.
I discovered these steps after reading the YouCanBookMe’s online help tool on non-standard start & end times (the “stencil” feature). If the company makes the interface and documentation clearer to newcomers, their tool is likely to be adopted by many former Google Calendar Appointment slots users. I hope that YCBM enjoys a longer life span on the web.
Updated April 2013: One thing to watch out for: if you create an “all-day” event on your calendar and the default setting is “busy,” it will accidentally block out any appointments that you have available to fill. This issue stumped me until I figured out the underlying problem. When I create all-day events in Google Calendar, the default is “available,” so that worked just fine. But when I created all-day events in my Google Calendar via my linked Apple Calendar (desktop or iOS), the default is “busy,” which overrides appointment availability that day for my students. Oops.
Wondering if anyone else has tried this…I did and the calendar in step 5 just shows x over every time period even though I set up a matching event per step 4, just wondering what I’m doing wrong!
Kim, sorry that this didn’t work right away for you. If you’ve double-checked your settings against my screenshots above and it still doesn’t work, you might consider contacting YouCanBookMe (team@softlysoftware.com) and ask them to check your site. As you realize, I’m just another user. Yesterday YCBM staff wrote to acknowledge that the directions I posted above were helpful. Please let me know what you find out, and if I goofed up somewhere, let me know!
Hi Kim,
The development team from YouCanBook.Me here. I just went through Jack’s set of instructions (thanks again for the great post Jack!) and can confirm he’s got everything correct on there.
If you are still seeing this problem on your booking page, we’d be keen to help work out what is happening. Please email me (keith@softlysoftware.com) with the link of your booking page so that I can take a look through your settings.
Regards,
Keith
The GREAT folks at YouCanBook.Me figured out what I was doing wrong! I have multiple personal google calendars and by default had linked to my primary calendar but I put my available times in my “student appointments” calendar. Once I fixed it, everything works great!
This sounds like a good workaround for losing the appointment slots that my students and I were just getting used to (we’re a Google campus, so everyone has a Google account anyway). I’m wondering, though, whether changing your availability from “busy” to “available” as you indicate in step 4 makes others viewing my calendar think that those times are free. Administrators love to schedule meetings any spare moment that people have, and I’d hate for one to be scheduled during my office hours just because a student hadn’t reserved a slot yet.
Good point, Jeff. Since I’m not on a Google Apps campus, I didn’t consider this issue, nor do I have a good way to test it. For instance, when other people schedule meetings, do they simply look for “available,” or do they stop to read that it says “office hours” in that slot on your calendar? If you have other strategies or tools, please share.
The tech support folks at YCB.me politely told me that working with multiple calendars (which would be an ideal solution to the potential problem I was describing) is a premium feature. As I didn’t think I’d need most of the features of a premium account, I considered other workarounds until it finally occurred to me to just create a different calendar called “office hours” that would be independent of my main calendar. Voila! I told YCB.me to use this calendar instead of my main one, and it seems to work perfectly. This has the downside of requiring me to enter my office hours twice (once on my main calendar for the public to see as “busy” and once on a secondary calendar for YCB.me to see as “available”), but that’s a small price to pay for what’s really a nifty service. I especially like the ability to create a QR code to include on my syllabus.
I just realized that this is pretty much the same solution that Kim used. It’s funny, but it didn’t “click” when I read her comment before that her problem would be my solution. I’d like to reiterate her comment that the tech support at YCB.me really is fantastic. You get prompt responses from real people who don’t blow you away with overly technical replies (I say this while recognizing the apparent irony that they didn’t actually help in my case).
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Thanks so much for this tutorial, Jack. I work at a Google Apps for Education school and thought that folks who work at such schools might appreciate having Jeff’s suggestions from the comments rolled into a tutorial specifically for them. So I’ve done that. You can find the adapted tutorial here: http://goo.gl/U7w8u Please leave any comments you have either here or on the tutorial itself.
Megan, thanks for adapting the tutorial for Google Apps for Ed campuses. It’s also a great example of how Creative Commons licensing helps to expand knowledge to other settings.
It looks like Google reversed its decision for Apps for Edu, Business, and Government customers. Appointment slots will be retained, according to the asterisk on their updated blog post. Good news for those folks, but not so great for consumer version users.
What of hybrid campuses? Mine is using gmail for students email, but MS exchange for faculty. I no longer have access to appointment slots. Is there something I or my institution can do (they won’t switch faculty email to gmail, but perhaps I can petition for something else)? My students love appointment slots as they all have automatic access through their campus email account. I don’t know what the decision process was, but our university decided to adopt MS exchange for faculty and gmail for students. I know a number of campuses have done that. I am using my gmail nonetheless (my private one) because of the superior spam filtering and unwavering reliability. But that means that as a private user, I have lost a tool I use a lot for work.
I’m also at a “mixed” campus where some faculty/staff use Outlook, some GCalendar, etc. That’s one reason why this YouCanBook.Me solution works for me, because I’m a GCal user, but it doesn’t require other people to have a GCal account to reserve a slot on my calendar. Not an institutional solution, I realize, but better than nothing.
I dragged my feet because I really loved Google appointments, but having just found out that moving my old office appointments to new days did not preserve them as office appointments, I reluctantly switched to youcanbook.me. The “on duty” is indeed completely counter-intuitive, but thanks to Jack’s excellent instructions, I was able to get that to work for me. Now I just need to share the new link with my students and see how it works when they book appointments. I would still love it if Google put back office appointments, though.
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Thanks for this article. Courtesy of it, I went to the youcanbook.me website, signed in with Google, and it was easy as pie. I’m a life coach, so my schedule changes frequently. Great to know about this tool!
Extremely helpful explanation, thank you! I think that the site now needs to work on schedules that don’t fit neatly into the regular fixed grid. e.g. The timetable at my school is broken down into 50 minute periods but these are punctuated by breaks/lunch of less than 50 minutes. Any suggestions would be very welcome!
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how can I get the booking to show up as something other that “booked: email@….”?
Good question, and I don’t know the answer. Check with YouCanBook.me by posting your question or searching others at http://feedbackfrenzy.com/service/form.jsp?instance=ycbm&null
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