Last year, Google introduced the “schedule appointments” feature in Calendar for individual Workspace users. The feature is now available for certain editions of Google Workspace.
Appointment scheduling in Google Calendar allows users to share their availability through a booking page, which can be used by external stakeholders, customers, and partners to schedule the time. Simply choose times from your calendar and adjust the availability of the appointment calendar to your needs. The booking page will automatically update to avoid conflicts with other events on your calendar.
“The new appointment scheduling feature is tailored for external use cases, allowing external users, including those without a Google Account, to schedule meetings. Additionally, with automatic detection of conflicts with existing calendar events, this feature helps reduce time spent searching for and rescheduling appointments,” Google wrote in a blog post on Friday.
Appointment scheduling in Google Calendar is gradually rolling out to Rapid Release domains, while full rollout for Scheduled Release domains will begin on April 6, 2022. The feature will be available for Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard , Enterprise Plus and Education Fundamentals. , Education Standard, Education Plus, upgrading teaching and learning and non-profit customers.
Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Frontline, and older G Suite Basic and Business customers don’t have access to the new feature.
The new appointment scheduling feature comes in addition to Google Calendar’s “meeting slots” feature, which is useful for internal use cases, especially if you don’t know who should meet with you, but you want to make yourself available.
How to create an appointment schedule in Google Calendar?
- Open Google Calendar.
- At the top left, click Create (+).
- Click Appointment Scheduling.
- Enter a title.
- Set the duration of your appointment.
- To set a custom duration, next to “30 minutes,” click the down arrow.
- Appointments should last at least 15 minutes.
- Set the date and time of your appointments.
- To set how far in advance appointments can be booked, next to ‘Scheduling window’, click the down arrow.
- By default, someone can book an appointment with you between 12 hours and 60 days in advance.
- Click Next.
- Optional: you can change your photo, set the meeting location, etc.
- After editing your meeting time, click Save.