Resource Scheduling

Overview

In DayBack, your events can be linked to "Resources," which can be anything you need to schedule—people, equipment, rooms, or a combination of these. An event can also be linked to more than one resource.

Resources are displayed as columns in the Resource view of the calendar. You can drag events from one resource to another to balance your schedule.

Here's a short overview of how resources work and how to set them up. While this video focuses on resources in DayBack for Salesforce, the main concepts apply to all calendars in DayBack:

Multi-Day Resource Scheduling

The Resource tab in the upper right of DayBack offers several options for the views shown above, including the option to scan across multiple days at once. This is very useful for balancing your workload.

If columns become too narrow, you can collapse the sidebar to create more space.

Additionally, you can show fewer resource columns and page through your resources. In the example below, we're filtering to show five resources but have elected to display only three columns. Clicking the arrows on either side of "Resource" allows us to page through them:

Breakout View

The Breakout version of the Horizon view lets you work at longer time scales while focusing on what’s scheduled for each resource. For more information and a video of breakout in action, visit: Breakout by Resource – balancing your workload.

Adding, Removing, and Sorting Resources

The list of possible resources is maintained in the Filters tab, where you can create and rename resources. Resources created here are available to all users in your group.

In some cases, DayBack will create a list of resources for you, such as in Salesforce, where you'll find a list of your users and admins when you first install DayBack. After this initial setup, resources are disconnected from your users list and maintained manually. This is advantageous because the list of resources doesn’t have to match your actual user list, allowing you to create other resource types, like conference rooms, vehicles, or business processes.

Automating the Creation of Resources & Folders

If you have many resources or your resources change frequently, DayBack can query your Salesforce Org, Basecamp Group, or another database for a list of resources and folders. This is also useful if you want to present different users with different lists of resources, such as showing a sales manager just the people in their territory.

These queries are run as custom calendar actions when DayBack starts up. Learn how to create these actions here, or we can create them for you as part of an implementation package.

Adding resource abbreviations (short names)

When viewing many resource columns, it can be helpful to show abbreviated resource names. When you elect to show more than twenty resource columns at a time, DayBack will display the resource's abbreviation instead of its full name.

Folders

By organizing your resources into folders, you can quickly filter at the folder level, showing or hiding all the resources in a folder at once. If you need the same resource in more than one folder, create a second entry for the same resource name and place each in its respective folder. Note that the "none" column cannot be placed into a folder.

Appointment Slots

The examples above involve schedulers scanning for gaps in their schedules. However, sometimes gaps only tell part of the story. The appointment, job, or work order may have additional criteria that aren't readily apparent, such as cleaning or prep time, additional resources, or skill matching.

In these cases, you likely want DayBack to suggest only those slots, resources, and time windows that match your criteria. Here’s one example of what that can look like.

For more information on DayBack's recommendation engine, see the additional screenshots and movies here: Recommending Appointment Slots.

Customizing Resources & Resource Behaviors

Resources in Salesforce

By default, DayBack uses an item's Owner as its resource. When mapping your objects' fields, you can specify a field in your events table to use for resources. When the value in that field matches a value in the resources list, DayBack will display the event in that resource's column.

FileMaker Specific

Using IDs Instead of Resource Names:

DayBack requires the field mapped to "Resource" to contain the resource name. If you're using IDs as well, you can set up your ID field to look up the resource's ID based on the name entered in the field mapped to "Resource."

Microsoft 365

Matching Resources with Attendees:

In DayBack, resources match up with attendees in Outlook. To show yourself as a resource in DayBack, add yourself to the event as an attendee. The event in MS365 will still list you as the "Organizer" and the person you're adding as the "Attendee." When you refresh the calendar in DayBack, it will then list both you and the other person as resources for that event.

We offer many useful extensions in our DayBack Extensions Library. Here are some of the most popular extensions that work with Resources.

Check out our DayBack Extensions Library for a more resource-related extensions.