Solving the mixed-availability problem for good

By Leo Giovanetti, Senior Full Stack Engineer at Cal.com, from experience during his 12 years at a major Software company.

Availability is tricky. You may be a small or large business, and you may have invested a lot to be able to be there for your clients whenever they need you, but the reality sooner or later hits right in your face: there are A LOT of calendar platforms out there, and you can’t force any client to use the one you use or even think about changing your own.

Calendar platforms are essential to any business; managing time efficiently is a must, as the familiar adage states: time is money. Therefore, ensuring your availability to clients is well put together is paramount for your business to thrive. Unfortunately, the vast number of platforms and the inability to work well together is a huge problem when organizing your availability.

Take Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. Two of the most usual suspects. Say your company relies entirely on Google Workspace, sending and receiving invites to organize your availability. It’s all sunshine and roses until a client with Microsoft Outlook comes into the picture. There are a couple of scenarios; let’s dig into each.

Problem 1: Manual labor

Imagine having to manually arrange a meeting between a couple of people through email or even Slack. That’s where “I’m available X time on Monday and Tuesday” type of messages come in, for which you get a friendly and warm “Oh, I’m not available at all on Tuesday, and I’m available Y time on Monday only, can you make it?”, to which you could accept and have to rearrange everything around or continue the merry-go-round of throwing availability expecting the best, getting worse.

Not to mention when you have to meet a larger group of people, prepare yourself to spend a good day or two having to arrange that meeting. That’s where you start hoping all that hustle is worth it, putting unconscious pressure to have a good outcome for the meeting. 

Not a good plan if you ask me. What else is there?

Problem 2: Syncing struggle

All is good, your client was good enough to give you an account within their platform, so you should be able to see their availability immediately and find the best possible time. But wait, it’s not just you. You need to find the best possible time for 3-4 people, maybe more, as more interest parties come in. That’s where your problem solver comes in and thinks there must be a way to sync your calendar with the one you have in the client’s platform—the same platform for everyone interested in attending the meeting.

Luckily there are quite a few automated syncing scripts you can configure to solve your problem, but they are not easy to configure if you are not into programming languages. You need to be clearer on what they do internally; what if they send each scheduled event to an external calendar, invading your privacy? That’s the kind of fraudulent behavior you need to be careful with. 

Also, these syncing scripts are not complete by a long shot. You may be lucky enough to configure it to sync your events from your platform to your clients’ platform. Still, you will need another syncing tool to sync your clients’ platform events to your platform, and you will have to maintain both of them over time. Interfaces may change, and scripts must be updated accordingly and reconfigured. A struggle I don’t recommend. 

There must be a way to solve this problem easily, right? Well, there is!

Cal.com solution

Cal.com specializes in creating and evolving the best possible platform for scheduling. Period. There’s nothing about Cal.com that you can’t audit if you need to. It’s a Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) platform wide open for you to use on your own. We offer a completely free account for individuals with batteries included, but also the best solution you could find for enterprises.

How does Cal.com solve the mixed-availability problem? You have your own account within the Cal.com platform. The ability to hook up your Google Calendar and your Microsoft Outlook calendar is all in one place. Then you create different event types you would want anyone to book you with, with Zoom included, or perhaps Google Meet. A fifteen-minute check-in, quick thirty-minute one on ones, every two-week recurring consultancy meetings, confirmation-required late-night support meetings, whatever you can imagine. The client goes into your Cal.com platform profile page and chooses a day/time according to your merged availability from all your connected calendars, and that’s it! Both get an email notification, the meeting gets created in your main calendar, and life goes on with no hassle.

Oh, but what about that meeting with more than two people attending? You can create teams within the Cal.com platform and have event types taking a round-robin or collective stance to better shape the kind of event you need to offer your client. All bring your availability from your connected calendars for each team member. Isn’t that just amazingly handy to have?

In addition, alongside the Workflow feature within Cal.com, there’s an App Store for you to bend your availability and schedule how you want to. How cool is that? Do you want to sync your preferred CRM with anyone that books you an event? Done! Do you want to experiment with another Video platform for your meetings? It’s one click away. Do you want to do something very intricate when you get a new booking? Create a new workflow in an instant. Not to mention the possibility of getting creative and using Cal.com’s API to manage every aspect you need.

Choose your own adventure

There are plenty of options for you to give the Cal.com platform an opportunity. You can always go to the individual SaaS option to see how it works or ask for a demo. There are also official ways to give the platform a shot.

For starters, you can run your own platform on your premises, having to keep an eye on to get fixes and new features. Alternatively, we can run an instance for you, ensuring it stays up-to-date, getting fixes and new features as they come along. And let me personally recommend the Enterprise tier. That’s the best bargain, a huge win-win for everyone, where you get the best platform, and we get to continue working on it, benefiting from the Open Source community.