What to have in place before using Team availability
This method matches the calendars of the members you select and calculates the candidates for you. Here is what to have in place before you use it.
- Help category
- Scheduling
Team availability reads the calendars of the members you select and works out the times that are open. There is no list of candidate times for you to write out: the candidates come from the calculation. The screen is /app/and. To use it at all, the members you want only have to be in the same organisation as you. How accurate the candidates are depends on the calendar each member has connected, and whether the confirmation is delivered depends on your own Zoom connection.
Three things to have in place, each with a different effect
If you are still the only person in the organisation there is nobody to schedule against, so the feature is not usable in practice. The member picker shows "You are the only member in this tenant. AND scheduling finds slots where multiple members are free, so invite members first." with an "Invite members" button next to it. The screen says tenant where this article says organisation; they are the same thing.
- Invite the members you want to schedule against. Inviting members and managing your organisation covers how to do that.
- Each member connects their own calendar and turns on "Use for availability" for it. A connection belongs to the person who made it, so you cannot set one up on another member's behalf. Point each member at Connecting your calendar and meeting tool.
- Connect Zoom to your own account before you confirm anything. Without it you can still create the session, run the calculation and confirm a time, but the confirmation is not delivered.
Conditions are saved as a session and can be recalculated until you confirm
What you set is the session name, the members, the meeting length, the search interval, the date range as a start date and an end date, the daily time window, whether weekends are skipped, a buffer before and after, and "Members allowed to be △". The time window starts at 09:00 to 18:00, and "Exclude weekends" is on from the beginning.
| Condition | What you can set | Starting value |
|---|---|---|
| Members | 1 to 50 people | — |
| Meeting length | 15 to 480 minutes | 60 minutes |
| Search interval | 5 to 120 minutes | 30 minutes |
| Buffer before and after | 0 / 15 / 30 / 45 / 60 minutes (five choices on screen) | 30 minutes |
| △ Allowable number of people | 0 to 10 people | 0 people |
"Recalculate candidates" runs the same conditions again. Every run replaces the previous candidates, which are gone once it finishes. A session that has been confirmed cannot be recalculated at all. At most 100 candidates are kept, so with wide conditions everything past that is not shown.
The number of members you can select does not change with the plan. What the plan governs is how many members the organisation can hold.
Only with △ at 0 are these the times when everyone is free
"Members allowed to be △" is the number of selected members who may already have something in their calendar and still leave the slot in the results. It starts at 0, and 0 is the only setting under which every candidate is a slot where all the selected members are free. Set it to 1 and slots where exactly one member is busy stay in as well.
Each candidate carries a score out of 5, one point lower for every additional member who is busy at that time. Candidates are listed by score, highest first, and each one is labelled with a line such as "Meets criteria 5/5 · free 4 · △ 1" and "Score 4/5".
A candidate is either confirmed as it stands or handed over to a poll
"Confirm this time" on a candidate confirms that time straight away. If you would rather hear from the participants first, "Create poll from candidates" carries the candidates and each member's availability into the poll creation screen. The hand-off needs current results, so recalculate before you use it. Creating a poll covers what happens from there.
This method has no answering stage of its own. Participants are registered at the moment you confirm, and until that moment not one email is sent to anybody.
Creating the session already counts as one schedule. How schedules are counted, and what the plans require, are in How pricing works.
Without Zoom connected, not one confirmation message is sent
The conference method here is fixed to Zoom and the screen offers no alternative, and "Automatically issue meeting URL" cannot be switched off either. Confirm a time while Zoom is not connected and the meeting URL cannot be created, so neither the confirmation email nor the reminders are sent.
The confirmation sent by this method also carries no attendance (RSVP) response URL. That URL is assembled from the share URL of the schedule, and a schedule created this way is never given a share URL.
Four things this method does not let you change
- The conference method is fixed to Zoom.
- The time zone is fixed to Japan time (Asia/Tokyo), with no choice on the screen and none in the API.
- A saved session is visible only to the person who created it and cannot be shared with other members. Two sessions cannot carry the same name either.
- Sending a response reminder to people who have not answered is not available.