New Features: Calendar Integration Updates
New Feature: Calendar Invites
ScheduleThing users may already be familiar with our custom email notifications which are sent to you and your client whenever an appointment is booked. Now, those notifications will come with an attached calendar invitation for easy integration into your iCal or Google Calendar. Simply confirm the reservation in the same way you would any other event in your personal calendar. That way you’ll always be aware of your daily tasks, whether they be work related or personal. It’s just one more way to use ScheduleThing to simplify your life.
New Feature: Subscribing to Calendar Feeds [Pay Plans Only]
If you already rely on an online calendar like Google Calendar or iCal, chances are, you don’t want to juggle between more than one schedule. We get it. Now, you can add a ScheduleThing subscription to your existing calendar system to view both schedules in one location. If you’re using the new invite feature added to every email confirmation, your own calendar probably already shows your reservations, but now you can also share the main calendar with everyone in your company. The other exciting thing about this feature relates to your resources: if your resources are people, it’s easy for them to see only their appointments by subscribing to their individual feeds.
To subscribe to your main ScheduleThing feed from your Google Calendar (our feed works in multiple major calendar systems, so read on for iCal and Outlook), head to your ScheduleThing dashboard. Under the calendar and resources, click the iCal button. Copy the URL provided.
Then, to add it to your Google Calendar, open up your main calendar, and in the “Other Calendars” section, select “Add by URL.” Simply paste the URL, and your ScheduleThing agenda will now appear in the “Other Calendars” area of your Google Calendar. It’s that simple.
If you’re only looking to add the schedule from a single resource to your calendar, click the “Resources” tab on from your ScheduleThing dashboard, and follow the same subscription process above, this time using the iCal URL provided next to each resource name. This works for reservation types, too.
*Note: We’ve explained how to integrate it with Google Calendar, but this works in iCal, Outlook, and other major calendar systems as well. In iCal, you can add the feed quickly and easily by selecting “Subscribe” under the “Calendar” heading. From Outlook, click “Account Settings” from the “Tools” menu, then select “Internet Calendars” and paste the URL.
New Feature: Adding Your Google Calendar Public Feed to Resources [Pay Plans Only]
Sometimes it’s tricky to keep your ScheduleThing agenda and the rest of your life in balance. Say you’ve got a meeting scheduled in the middle of your workday, but your clients didn’t know and thus booked an appointment during the same time. Double booking is a drag, and now ScheduleThing is taking steps to keep it from happening. If you’ve got a separate personal Google Calendar, you can link it to ScheduleThing so the online booking software knows when you’re not available.
To use this feature with Google Calendar, first head to your personal calendar and make it publicly available to view free and busy times. You can do this by choosing the calendar from the main page, in the dropdown menu, select “Calendar Settings.” From there, click on the “Share this Calendar” tab. Then check “Make this calendar public” and in the corresponding dropdown, select “See only free/busy.” Once it’s saved, click the “Calendar Details” tab and scroll down to the bottom, where you’ll find “Calendar Address.” Click the iCal button and copy the URL.
Next, head to your ScheduleThing Resources page. Select the desired resource (the one you want to link to your public calendar feed) and then scroll to the bottom of the page. Under “Block this resource whenever there’s an event on this calendar,” paste the URL from your Google Calendar and save. This feature updates your free/busy timeslots hourly, and once it updates, customers will be unable to book times that conflict with your feed.
