In This Guide:
Overview
Coaches can easily integrate their external calendars with Coaching.com, creating a seamless experience for managing availability and booking session. Coaches can continue to work with their existing calendars, and with a few clicks can manage their schedules, book sessions, and have full visibility of availability from within the Coaching.com platform.
Supported External Calendars
Coaching.com allows supports integration with the following external calendar providers:
Google / GMail
Microsoft Calendars (Outlook, Office 365)
Apple / iCloud (*Currently supported in Nylas v2.0, and coming in the first part of 2024 for Nylas v3.0)
Syncing Your Calendar
Syncing your calendar and setting up your ‘Open Office Hours’ allows you to manage your scheduled events to make sure there aren’t any conflicts when scheduling time with Coachees.
Please find a video guide below, along with a step-by-step walkthrough:
Step by Step Instructions for Connecting Your Calendar
Starting at your ‘Dashboard’, you’ll click on the gears icon to go to your 'Settings' page:
From the settings page, then click on the Calendar card to go into the Calendar Settings:
You can connect your calendar by clicking the ‘Connect Calendar’ button on the banner or you can go into your Calendar tab and click ‘Connect Calendar’.
You will be presented with a dialog that allows for you to continue into the workflow. The dialog shows the external calendars that are supported.
After clicking 'Connect' from the screen above, the next screen in the workflow will ask you for your email. This is the email that is associated with an external calendar.
If you have issues connecting to an external calendar, please remember that only the following calendar providers are supported: Google/Gmail, Microsoft Calendars (Outlook, Office 365), Apple/iCloud.
After connecting successfully, you will see the calendar connection appear on your Calendar Settings page.
Once your calendar is ‘Connected’, you can select which calendars to check for conflicts and which calendars to add events to. To do this select the 'Edit Calendars' button.
‘Check for conflicts’ – We will use this calendar to read ‘Busy’ times and events and we’ll block these times and dates from your clients when scheduling.
‘Add events’ – We will use this calendar to write and add events scheduled by your clients.
To disconnect a synced calendar simply click ‘Disconnect Calendar’
Managing Your Schedule
After connecting your calendar and selecting your calendar preferences. You’ll want to set up your ‘Open Office Hours’ and scheduling policies.
To do this, you’ll want to click on the ‘Pencil’ icon
Set your office hours by setting your available hours for each day. If you have certain days with a different set of hours, please click ‘Add’, select the day and choose the hour availability for that specific day:
Coachees will only be able to schedule within these hours.
Please note that if you have a scheduled an event on a selected ‘Check for Conflicts’ calendar, this time will not be available for Coachees to select. Once you’ve selected your office hours and available hours, click ‘Save’.
Scheduling & Cancellation
Padding between sessions: Set an amount of buffer time in between scheduled events. For example, if you have a meeting scheduled for 10-11am and a ‘padding’ of 30 minutes, 9:30-11:30 will be treated as busy.
No session scheduling within: Set the minimum amount of time a Coachee can schedule a session beforehand. For example, if it is 8:00am on June 9th, and you have a minimum amount of time set of 48 hours. June 9th and June 10th will be treated as busy and the first available time presented to your Coachee will be June 11th at 8:00am, if available.
Session Cancelation policy: Set the minimum amount of time a Coachee can cancel before their scheduled session.
Meeting Locations
You may also set up your default meeting locations for sessions and matching interviews
Click ‘ Create New’
A ‘Meeting Locations’ window will open and this is where you can add and save locations (physical locations, a URL or a phone number)
Your saved locations will be available for you when setting a session location
Once you have set up your location(s), hover over the icons on the right side and set your ‘Global Defaults’
Notes About Participants on Coach Calendar Events
If you have integrated your calendar after December of 2023, please see the following:
When it comes to scheduling events, Coaching.com integrates with a coach's calendar to create and update events, and also sends the appropriate emails to the clients and coach with the session or discovery call information.
When writing the events to coach's calendars through the calendar integration described above, Coaching.com will not include the session participants emails in the coach's calendar events. This alleviates additional email that these calendar providers would send to the client, which would produce duplicate invitations for the same event. Instead the participant information is included in the title, as well as the event description. This does not impact the client or coachee receiving the invite, and being able to attend the session.
Instructions for Microsoft Enterprise Customers
You may be a part of an enterprise that uses Microsoft (Outlook, Exchange, Office365), where your permissions are controlled through an administrator within your team. Coaching.com has published an App Registration called Coaching.com Calendar Integration in Azure. This App Registration can be easily linked into your company’s Azure Portal by an IT Administrator on your team.
To enable the Coaching.com Calendar Integration (Application Client ID: ad4fa254-62ca-4329-b7cf-86fdf14fb2ac), IT Administrators can apply the admin consent workflow to enable the integration for their users.
IT Administrators from your company can follow the URL below to grant access:
https://login.microsoftonline.com/{tenant_id}/v2.0/adminConsent?client_id=ad4fa254-62ca-4329-b7cf-86fdf14fb2ac&scope=profile%20openid%20User.Read%20offline_access%20Calendars.ReadWrite%20Calendars.ReadWrite.Shared&redirect_uri=https://app.coaching.com/admin-consent
The tenant-id can be replaced with the Azure tenant ID of your company’s instance, and the client_id is the Coaching.com Calendar Integration. The administrator will see the following screen to apply consent:
The scopes necessary for integration include the general user profile, as well as calendar access. Once consent is accepted by the IT administrator, the integration will show up as an Enterprise Application within the Azure tenant as "Coaching.com Calendar Integration".
Administrators can go into the Enterprise Application to adjust the permissions. Specifically, self service is a common model with organizations pertaining to Coaching.com for coach calendar integration. This means that since calendar integration is approved at the organization level via the Admin Consent workflow, coaches do not require further approval to be able to connect their calendar for scheduling.
Setting up for Self Service
To setup self service, navigate to Enterprise Applications -> Coaching.com Calendar Integration. Select the Self-service menu item in the left navigation. Ensure that the following settings are applied:
"Allow users to request access to this application?" is set to "Yes"
"Require approval before granting access to this application?" is set to "No"
See below for an example.
