Availability Scheduling

Overview

Show your availability as a colored background in your calendar, blocking out time around operating hours, vacations, or downtime.

Each DayBack calendar has a setting called "Show As Unavailable." When enabled, this setting displays events as background blocks that cannot be clicked or dragged. The background color indicates that the assigned resource is unavailable during that time.

Note: While the screenshots below are all from Salesforce, availability scheduling works in any calendar source.

The examples below demonstrate using the "Resource Absence" object from Salesforce's Lightning Scheduler. However, this feature is available in any calendar. You can create a custom object to block off availability or use multiple calendar sources to do this.

For instance, you could schedule your appointments in Salesforce while maintaining your availability in Google Calendar or Google Sheets. Google Calendar is ideal for this type of setup since it supports repeating events, making availability blocking significantly easier.

Rules and Exceptions

Availability is often a combination of rules and exceptions. Rules might be something like "Jim is available every Wednesday and Thursday from 2pm to 5pm until June 31st," while exceptions might be "Jim has a doctor's appointment next Thursday from 3pm to 4pm."

DayBack can be customized to display your availability rules without you needing to create hundreds of repeating events. These rules are typically stored in new tables in Salesforce, each with a date range. DayBack queries Salesforce for these rules and displays them on the calendar as if they were individual events.

Rules are often created by an admin using native Salesforce pages, while exceptions are entered into DayBack by the resources themselves and then approved by an admin before affecting availability.

If you're interested in adding rule-based availability to DayBack, please get in touch so we can discuss adding an implementation package to your deployment.

Designating a Calendar as Your Unavailable Times

To toggle "Show As Unavailable" on or off, use the setting at the bottom of the Calendar Info tab:

Set to "Yes": The source becomes uneditable, and these events are displayed as "background" events in the calendar.
Set to "No": You can edit these records in DayBack.

Unavailability support across different view types

DayBack supports displaying unavailability calendars in Resource views that are displaying times along the top or along the left side of the screen. Unavailability is not supported on Resource views that are displaying a list of events without times. For the events on the unavailability calendar to appear in a specific resource's column or row, they must be assigned to that resource.

Turning Off Unavailable For Quick Editing

Resource Absence records and other data sources can be created outside of DayBack. However, by disabling the "Show as Unavailable" setting, you can edit and create new records directly in DayBack, leveraging its quick editing features. This is especially useful with DayBack's Duplicating Events feature. For the fastest setup, select a data source like Google Calendar or FileMaker that supports repeating events.

This process is demonstrated in the movie at the top of this page.

You can share your private Google Calendar events with others, choosing how they appear in DayBack. These events can either show as colored blocks indicating unavailability in resource-specific views or as read-only "Busy" event blocks across all DayBack views. This depends on your settings in the Google Calendar app and the "Show as Unavailable" setting in DayBack.

Steps to Share Your Calendar:

Select Your Calendar: Open your Google Calendar app, select the calendar you want to share, and adjust the sharing settings.
Set Sharing Permissions: Choose the individuals you want to share with and set their permissions to "See only free/busy (hide details)".
Availability Settings: Events marked as "free" on your private calendar won't appear in your subscribers' views since you are available during these times. All other events will show as read-only with the title "busy".

In DayBack, while you can still view and edit your events, others will see them as "busy," similar to how they would appear in their own Google Calendar app. For a more tailored display, set your shared calendar in DayBack to "Show as Unavailable." This will:

Change how your "busy" events are displayed.
Restrict them to resource-specific views.
Remove the "busy" label, displaying them simply as unavailability blocks.

Note: Sharing your calendar does not automatically update DayBack’s list. Each shared user receives an email invitation to subscribe to your calendar. They must accept this invitation and refresh their browser in DayBack to see the events from the newly shared calendar.

Color Coding Unavailable Time

DayBack's Unavailable Calendars honor Event Colors and Status. In this example, the unavailable status field is mapped to the Resource Absence Type field. A folder with corresponding types is set up in DayBack to assign a color to each type.

Tooltips

You can add tooltips to availability events just like any other source. Ensure the event action for your tooltip is enabled for both "Editable" and "Read Only" events. This is necessary for availability records since they are read-only when "Show as Unavailable" is set to "Yes."

Here is the code for the tooltip shown above:

dbk.tooltip(
   '<div class = "timeToolTip toolTipHeader">' +
   'Unavilable' +
   '</div>' +
   '<div class = "toolTipAllDay">' +
   event.status +
   '</div>'
   );

The classes timeToolTop , toolTipHeader , and toolTipAllDay are from our timezone example and you can download that CSS here.

Working with Lightning Scheduler in Salesforce

Lightning Scheduler uses a rules-and-exceptions approach to availability. We've created detailed setup instructions for mapping Lightning Scheduler's objects to DayBack Calendar:

Part one: Resource Scheduling.
Part two: Availability.

Solicit Availability from Team Members

DayBack can create workflows where your team submits their availability for approval. The business can then accept and lock availability records for utilization reports. See this in action here.