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I'm looking for a solution to help me do calendar management in my system (something like Calendar as a Service).
Some of the features that I would need are:
- Ability to create a calendar for every user in my system.
- Allow everyone to set their availability and Off Days. They should also be able to change the availability for a specific day.
- Ability for the system to book a timeslot on any of the user's calendars.
- Ability to check conflicts before booking a slot.
- Ability to get notified via Webhooks whenever someone cancels the already booked slots.
I don't need a UI. I can use any readily available Calendar UI Component. All I need is a service that can provide APIs to manage multiple calendars (one of each user in my system).
I've explored Calendly, but it requires every user within my system to have an account on Calendly as well. So it's not going to work for me.
Currently, I'm exploring Calendso, but I would appreciate it if you could share any other services you are familiar with that I should explore for this use case.
Good questions, Sarang. Personally, I think your requirements raise more questions. First of all, you've already mentioned that Calendly won't work for you, so I'll not dive further into Calendly for you.
Calendso has rebranded to cal.com and I'm looking into what that service does exactly.
I have a longer list of tools at https://yoursales.com/sales-stack-2021#scheduling with more detailed comparison at https://tech.yoursales.com/scheduling .
Your requirements: Ability to create a calendar for every user in my system: most calendar tools should be able to do that.
Allow everyone to set their availability and Off Days. They should also be able to change the availability for a specific day: This seems quite possible as well with most calendar systems.
Ability for the system to book a timeslot on any of the user's calendars: You mean, in random fashion, like round-robin or as the person scheduling decides???
Ability to check conflicts before booking a slot:: This seems quite possible as well.
Ability to get notified via Webhooks whenever someone cancels the already booked slots: This seems quite possible as well.
For your setup you need a few components. At minimum you need a calendar and a scheduler. Typically those to are separate.
Calendaring would be done by Google Calendar, some sort of Microsoft product, or a CalDav compatible calendar system.
The scheduling system is separate and connects to either of the calendaring systems mentioned above. The tools you mentioned in your original post are scheduling systems, which leaves another question: which calendar system would you like to use?
Pros of Assistant.to
Pros of Calendly
- Different meeting URLs4
- Google Calendar integration2
- Ability to block off times2
- Great for coordinating across timezones2
- Google analytics integration1
- Easy Payments1
Pros of Doodle
- I likes the meetings plans2