Having events from Assembled show up as "not busy" on google calendar
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John Wang
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Thanks everyone for the wonderful comments -- we've gone ahead and built this feature! You can now set the events that get synced from Assembled to Google Calendar to either "Free" or "Busy".
If you're looking for a bit more info, you can find a quick demo of the new feature here https://www.loom.com/share/eb4093b2c5884e07965475f69978ade4
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Blue Horse
John Wang: Was super excited to see this change went live today, however it doesn't quite fulfill the full scope of the needs. There are some events that we do still want to sync as busy - for example, times when agents will be assigned to the queue and therefore should not be booked for other things. However, there are other events that we'd like to sync as free so that other activities can be scheduled as needed.
Similar to Melissa Brand's suggestion, I would propose this be managed via the Events page and a section be added for "Google Sync Status" where you could select Free or Busy, as you would when creating the event in Gcal directly. This would allow us the flexibility to decide which event should sync in which way versus everything syncing the same because not all events are created equal, so to speak. :)
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Silver Prawn
Blue Horse: +1 to this comment! I was excited to see this change went live so quickly but, for the time being, it isn't going to fulfill our needs as a team. This would ideally be handled on the event level, since some events should continue to be marked as busy. If this feature could be expanded so that "busy" and "free" status is assigned at the individual event level, we'll be able to utilize this feature.
John Wang
Silver Prawn: Thanks both for the comments! We're actively tracking updates to this feature -- the extra step of adding more granular permissions to events is considerably more complicated to implement, but something we're looking into over the next month or so.
We're tracking this on a new issue here https://assembled.canny.io/feature-requests/p/freebusy-settings-by-event
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Shamrock Lion
Blue Horse: I wanted to follow up with you because we have enabled this functionality! You can see a demo here and please let us know if you have any questions/feedback: https://www.loom.com/share/b493d4033a354774a3396857c40773e6
John Wang
in progress
John Wang
planned
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Silver Prawn
Would love to see this ability! One use case we can foresee is having our agents on an incident management rotation. We could add this event in Assembled from 9am- 1pm for Agent #1 to be "on call", but it wouldn't mark them as busy on their calendar. That way, the agent can see the hours they need to be on call but are still free to take meetings, do other work, etc.
If they are marked as busy, others viewing their calendar might not understand what the block is and would avoid scheduling a meeting. As far as how this could be accomplished in Assembled, it could be a new event type or maybe just add a visibility setting to the events (such as on the Settings > Events page). Much like it's listed in Google a new "Visibility" column would allow us to decide if the specific event is free or busy. That way we could still set it as Productive if that was a good fit, but "free" so that it doesn't block their time off on the calendar.
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Tropical Lynx
This conflicts with our Calendly integration to help schedule meetings with customers.
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Shamrock Lion
Tropical Lynx: Thanks for providing feedback! To make sure that I understand the scenario, at the moment all of the events in Assembled that are synced into Google calendar are marking the agent as busy, but ideally all of them should be marked as free so that agents can setup meetings with agents? Are there specific event types that you want to still remain busy (eg productive events)? Also is google calendar the place that agents use at the moment to view their schedule?
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Tropical Lynx
Shamrock Lion: Yes I would like th eoption to mark events as either busy or not. Like with Zendesk talk or Chat (when we start using it) Those events we would not want agents to be able to schedule over.