TimeZest's Office 365 calendar integration is only available to subscribers on the Professional Plan.
TimeZest can now integrate with Office 365, and allow appointments there to block times for scheduling, as well as have appointments your clients schedule written to the calendar there. This guide will tell you about the new feature, and how to use it.
The Office 365 integration was designed to make TimeZest available to those users in your organization who use Office 365 as their primary calendar, instead of the calendar in ConnectWise Manage or Autotask. It works with all our existing features, and will even work in panel scheduling scenarios - for example, a sales onboarding call with an account manager using Office 365 and a networking engineering using ConnectWise Manage. TimeZest will handle that just fine.
Some things to know
TimeZest's Office 365 calendar integration is a tenant-level integration, which means it needs to be authenticated by an administrator of your Office 365 tenant, and will then have access to calendars for everyone in your organization.
Like TimeZest's Microsoft Teams integration, TimeZest will automatically attempt to associate Office 365 user accounts with TimeZest user accounts, based on their email addresses. This can fail, however, if you use different email addresses in Office 365 as you do in TimeZest (or in ConnectWise Manage/Autotask, where TimeZest will often pull email addresses from).
Each user must have one and only one writeable calendar. This will be either their Office 365 calendar, or their Autotask/ConnectWise Manage calendar. This setting determines where appointments for this user will be written.
Each user can specify at least one calendar which TimeZest reads existing appointments from. It's possible to configure TimeZest to only read from your Office 365 calendar, or your ConnectWise Manage/Autotask calendar, or both. Appointments that appear in both calendars won't cause any problems.
Installing the integration
To install the Office 365 integration, go to Integrations, and click on the Office 365 Calendar integration.
There, click on the Authenticate with Office 365 button.
You'll then be taken to Office 365, and asked to approve the TimeZest Calendar application for access to your Office 365 tenant. You'll need to be an Office 365 administrator to do this.
After authenticating the TimeZest integration with Office 365, you'll be asked if you want to enable Office 365 calendars for reading for all users who have them. TimeZest will now automatically try to associate your users in TimeZest with users in Office 365 by matching their email addresses.
Configuring Users
You can now configure each how TimeZest uses each user's calendar(s) when scheduling. This is done in the Users section, where a new Calendars section will be visible.
The options shown here will change for each using, depending on whether they are associated with a ConnectWise Manage/Autotask account, Office 365 account or both.
Each user can be configured to instruct TimeZest to read conflicting appointments from either calendar, or both. One calendar must always be selected as the calendar to which appointments will be written for that user.
Availability is configured as before, however as Office 365 cannot provide availability information about a user, TimeZest will only allow custom availability for users who only have an Office 365 calendar. By default, TimeZest will set an availability of Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm for any user who doesn't have an availability already configured for them.
Configuring Appointment Types
No specific configuration is needed for appointment types, however if you wish to have an appointment type which can be used by Office 365 users with a shareable URL that creates no ticket in ConnectWise Manage/Autotask, ensure the Shareable URL mode is set to the following:
TimeZest will simply ignore the configured settings for the ConnectWise Manage Activity, or Autotask To-Do when writing the Office 365 appointment for a user who has that set as their writeable calendar.