Work Smarter with New Schedule Capabilities

Great news: Schedule is now available for both Apricot and ETO!  

With Schedule, you can schedule appointments, with the ability to set availability and add video conferencing services, right from within Apricot or ETO. In addition, Schedule integrates seamlessly with the tools you already use today, like Google Calendar, Outlook and Zoom.

Schedule makes it easier to deliver both virtual and in-person services, removing barriers to service and making it easier for people to connect with the help they need. 

In the webinar recording below, Fallon Thompson, Product Manager, and Chelsea Edwards, Product Marketing Manager, share how you can work smarter with Schedule. The recording includes a demo of the new feature and answers to common FAQs. 

Below the webinar recording, you’ll find the Q&A from the webinar. Check out the release notes to learn more about Apricot & ETO Schedule: (Apricot | ETO).

Q&A: 

Who is Schedule available for? 

Schedule is included (at no additional cost!) for the following customers: 

• Apricot: Core and 360 customers – Schedule is available to everyone under the “Schedule” link in the side navigation bar. 
• ETO: TouchPoints customers – Schedule is currently turned on for Enterprise Managers. Enterprise Managers are encouraged to modify the navigation rule to “turn it on” for all users as soon as they are ready! Please see our Knowledge Base Article for more information on how to modify navigation rules. 
• Penelope: Coming soon! 

What programs does Schedule currently integrate with? What does it mean when you sync your calendar with Apricot or ETO? 

We have partnered with a third-party software called Cronofy to implement this capability into our software, so we are able to integrate with the applications that Cronofy will support. To learn more about Cronofy⁠—what they will support for integrations, as well as their security and privacy qualifications⁠—please check out their website. 

For calendars, Schedule will integrate with Outlook, iCloud, Gmail, Exchange and Office 365. For video conferencing, Schedule will integrate with Zoom, GoToMeetings and Teams. 

We currently do not integrate with RingCentral. However, for RingCentral and other video conferencing services, you can still manually add your account link as the location when adding an appointment. 

We currently do not integrate with Microsoft Bookings or other booking software. 

When you sync your calendar, you are essentially sharing your existing appointments, as well as your availability, with Apricot or ETO. This means that you will see all of your appointments for your existing calendar account (ex. Outlook) in Apricot or ETO. It’s a two-way sync, so any appointments made in Outlook will automatically transfer and be viewable in Apricot/ETO, and any appointments made in Apricot/ETO will be transferred to Outlook (or whatever calendar provider your organization uses).

You cannot currently choose which appointments will sync – all of them will sync. However, if you set an appointment as private in Outlook (or another calendar provider), then it will show in Apricot/ETO as “Private.” You and other users will not be able to see any details whatsoever for a private appointment.

Can participants schedule appointments directly with staff? 

With Connect Scheduler, they will be able to! Connect Scheduler was released to Apricot 360 on Friday, July 23. We will eventually be implementing this capability into ETO as well. 

To learn more about Connect Scheduler, check out our release notes. 

Can you report on Schedule? Can you report on the attendance of appointments? 

In ETO, yes! Schedule is currently available to report on. To learn more, please check out our Knowledge Base Article. 

In Apricot, we are currently in the development process of making Schedule available in reporting; Coming very soon! 

A common question is being able to report on “no shows” to appointments. Unfortunately, our software has no way of knowing whether or not a participant shows up to an appointment without someone telling it, especially if it was an in-person meeting. “Telling” the software typically looks like filling out a Tier 2 form or a TouchPoint that indicates whether the participant showed up or not. This would definitely be reportable!

What if I need to schedule appointments for my coworkers? Can I see other users’ calendars?  

Yes! You can see other users’ calendars if they have also synced their calendars with Apricot/ETO. You can even choose to see all of your coworkers’ calendars at once in order to see a “Master Calendar” for your organization and get a high-level view of everyone’s availability.  

For ETO specifically, there is an additional setting where you can set up additional permissions for whose calendars you can see in Schedule. This is in addition to existing security settings that your organization already has in place. This setting is under Manage Schedule under Manage Site Administration. This setting allows a site to determine whether they want to be able to “view across site” or simply “view across program” for Schedule. This means that a user can either see all users’ calendars and participants across an entire site or only the users and participants in the program that they are currently in.  

Currently, this setting is “all or nothing” – in other words, you can either set Schedule across the entire site or set it to only programs. There is no way to configure which programs can share and which cannot.  

NOTE: In Apricot, Tier 1 permissions are still respected when populated in the participant dropdown.  

Is there a centralized location for me to see all upcoming or past appointments for a participant? 

Yes! In Apricot, there is a new tab on the Document Folder called “Appointments.” You will be able to see all upcoming and past appointments for that participant. You will also be able to add an appointment for that participant right from that tab!

In ETO, there is a new link on the Participant Information dashboard part, as well as on the View/Edit Participant page, labeled “View Appointments.” It will take you to a new page where you will see all upcoming and past appointments for that participant. You will also be able to add an appointment for that participant right from that tab.

Can I schedule appointments with groups of participants? 

Yes! In Apricot, you can select multiple participants for an appointment. In ETO, you can do that, but you can also select to add appointments by Family or Collection as well. 

How are clients notified of appointments being made with them? 

From Schedule, they will receive an email or “Appointment Notification,” which will notify them of an appointment being made. It will include all of the information that the staff user entered for the appointment – Participants, Staff Attendees, Appointment Title, Date and Time, Description and Location. 

An email will get sent to the email listed under the participant in your database. While there is no way to “turn off” notifications for an appointment for a participant, you can choose not to send the participant an email by listing a fake email address under the participant (fake@fake.com). 

That being said, in order to add an appointment with a participant, they will need to have an email address associated with them. Again, if your organization does not collect email addresses for the populations you serve, entering a fake email address will allow you to implement Schedule in your organization. 

There are not reminders for appointments, but eventually, we would like to integrate Schedule with capabilities like Rules & Alerts, Workflows & Alerts and even Direct Messages to help even further simplify this workflow.  

How does Schedule know what participants to use and what email addresses to pull (for Apricot)? 

Your administrator will need to configure Schedule prior to anyone in the organization using Schedule. During this configuration, the administrator will choose what Tier 1 form(s) will populate Schedule as participants in the participant dropdown. They will also choose what secondary identifier is used to search for participants in the dropdown. For more information on this configuration, please see the Knowledge Base Article. 

What enhancements are we thinking about for the future? 

We have had a lot of great feedback on Schedule, but we know there is always room for progress, too. We encourage you to visit our Ideas Portal and enter these ideas (or upvote them if they exist already!). The Product team uses the Ideas Portal to determine what’s next for our software, so upvoting and commenting on an idea is the best way to get a direct say to what we build next! Below are some ideas for enhancements for Schedule that were mentioned during the webinar. 

1. Linking a Tier 2 form (Apricot) or TouchPoint (ETO) to an appointment 
2. Appointment Types + associated time blocks (for example: being able to make an appointment type of “Intake” and have it automatically set to 30 minutes) 
3. Incorporating Schedule with Rules & Alerts/Workflows & Alerts/Direct Messages 

For any other questions or concerns, we encourage you to reach out to our Support team, and they will be more than happy to assist you.