I have a lot of internal meetings with collaborators (they look at my Outlook availability and pick a “free” time), but I need to have at minimum 1 hour a day open for external meetings (scheduled through youcanbookme).
How can I set up a “youcanbookme hour” in Outlook, which looks busy (or at least tentative) to my coworkers, but looks free when youcanbookme reads it? I’d be happy with just a youcanbookme setting which says “read tentative as free everywhere”.
The only workaround I can think of is to use a different calendar for youcanbookme, but that kind of defeats the purpose of youcanbookme’s calendar synchronization. (Ideally I’d like it set up so that external folks can book through youcanbookme at other times too, outside of that hour, if I happen to be free that week.)
Note that I currently have a free basic account, but I’m considering upgrading for more functionality.
@PatrickR I am terribly sorry on the delay with getting back to you. In order for us to create events on your calendar you need to leave things as free or available. Now there is way with Custom Availability to designate a specific event on your calendar that you can setup. Essentially title it Youcanbookme hour, and mark it as free. Then this will be the only hour we will show as available. I am not sure how your colleagues would see this. More info with Custom Availability here. This is a paid feature. If you would like I can add a trial to your account for you to test it out.
I had tried that, but people aren’t used to paying attention to conflicts marked as “free”. I’m looking for a way to (at minimum) mark it as “tentative” but have YCBM view it as free.
I’ve created a temporary workaround that makes YCBM look at a different calendar that is almost completely empty, and have Outlook show me both calendars. But that is far from ideal, and it ignores the main power of YCBM (indeed, a simple booking app that had no calendar synchronization would be easier to use, so I’m considering switching away).
Is YCBM considering adding a paid feature like what I’m describing (special busy or tentative calendar times, that YCBM will always consider available when trying to book) in the future?
One option could be to use Custom Availability and mark the event as busy on your calendar. Then under units per slot you can increase this to 2. This means that one slot will be used up by your Custom Availability event which will block things internally, and that would leave up to one more slot for folks to book. If you get another appointment and add a second busy event you will be completely blocked through our system. Information about Units per slot here. I set you up with a two week trial to test it.
However, when I tried to set up my summer availability, something seems to have changed. I have the same setup, but it is now showing those events as not bookable. If I change them to “free”, then they are suddenly bookable (twice…).
Was a setting changed in YouCanBook.Me to disallow this workaround?
When you move this to one then mark your YCBM events on the calendar the time will show up. We moved over your pages to our new system which is different than the old system. The old system would have used the busy YCBM event as one unit freeing up another unit to be booked. Now if the YCBM event is not set to FREE there is no availability.
@PatrickR no, we will be moving everyone to this new system and will be only having this system moving forward. Again if you are using Calendar Managed Availability then you will want to make sure that the events on your calendar are marked as FREE. This is built off of new logic that the older system did not consider.
