Appointments Manager: Scheduler Planning

Schedulers are the most important building block when creating your Appointments Guest Views.  Creating, Testing and Managing Schedulers will often be the majority of  effort for Appointments Managers.  In the Guest View workflow, Schedulers are the screens for Appointment availability and selection, confirmation and email invites.   Additionally, Schedulers define which Calendar Providers can take appointments, hours for appointment availability, how far in advance appointments can be scheduled, meeting length, meeting intervals and if the meetings are in person or on the phone.

The first step in managing Schedulers is to determine the Schedulers you will need.   This is based on the number of Categories, Sub-Categories and Locations that will be included in your Guest Views.  Every Scheduler is a unique combination of a Category, a Sub-Category and a Location.  As a result, the number of Schedulers required is the number of Categories multiplied by the number of Sub-Categories multiplied by the number of Locations.  So for example, if you do a general Guest View with X categories and Y Sub-Categories and all of these are available at Z locations, they number of Schedulers you will need to create is X * Y * Z. The math illustrates that the number of schedulers can grow quite large so it is important to critically consider how many Categories and Sub-Categories you really need.