Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Google Calendar Appointment Slot Double Booking Mystery

We use Google calendars with appointment slots to let teachers book computer labs and other resources from our high school library. There is a mystery we need help solving: sometimes two teachers are able to reserve the same timeslot. Check out this short video for more details. If you have any suggestions or ideas about how we can solve this and not have this problem, please comment or send a tweet to:
http://twitter.com/wfryer

NOTE: In preparing a links for this post, I read on Google’s official support page for calendar “appointment slots” that they are TERMINATING support for new appointment slots as of January 4, 2013. What TERRIBLE news. 🙁 So instead of just solving this problem I think we’re going to need an ALTERNATIVE solution to Google Calendar Appointment Slots. If you have ideas / suggestions please share…

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4 responses to “Google Calendar Appointment Slot Double Booking Mystery”

  1. Kris Hagel Avatar

    Have you seen http://youcanbook.me/? I just heard about it a couple of days ago when complaining about this feature disappearing as well. We were just planning to get started with it for Parent Teacher Conferences in our middle schools. Youcanbook.me looks like it might do what we need.

  2. Shannon Parker Avatar

    I second the suggestion for You Can Book Me, although I personally haven’t gotten the teachers at my school to buy in yet…they still just email me.

  3. Bonni Stachowiak Avatar

    I have found http://www.timetrade.com to be a useful tool for booking office hours appointments with me. I have three appointment type options: a 15-minute, 30-minute, and hour-long option. I subscribe to the pro version, which is around $50/year and syncs flawlessly with iCal (and other calendar types). I highly recommend it.

  4. Danielle Avatar
    Danielle

    In looking at your video, it seems as though you’re not actually double booked. When you opened one of the supposedly double booked slots, it showed the Brown slot… look closely at it and you’ll see a little circle with a slash through it next to the Brown email/name (right side of the open event page). This means that Brown originally made the appointment, then cancelled it. Once it’s cancelled, you still have it on your calendar (for some reason…) but the appointment slot (rightly) opens up for people to grab the now available time slot. To keep your page clean, you can delete the cancelled appointment. Hope this helps!