Meeting scheduling – how to declare availability
Imagine you have a website where you can book appointments. A visitor of the website is able to choose his desired time slot. What I would like to discuss here is the other side of the story: the party that has to declare the availability.
There are potentially two approaches to declare the appointment time slots as I see it at the moment:
- By declaring business hours in which meetings can be booked. Calendars of employees are watched and free time is available for booking
- Employees explicit declare time they are available explicitly and this time is then available for booking. Employee proactively mark availability, rather than block time-slots that should not get booked
So far I have only come across tools that offer option 1. Is there an obvious reason for this?
For option 2 I see the following:
Pro:
- Easier fine granular control on employee level
- No need to block calendar time totally if time should no be bookable, still be available for internal meetings while not be available for booking
Cons:
- Must manage availability on employee level - more work