Appointment Scheduling - less than 15 minute appointments

[tbigby]

Kia ora Google Workspace team,

As a Customer Connect rep I have been eagerly awaiting the new "Appointment Scheduling" feature, which was announced on Friday: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2022/03/blog-post.html

This would be absolutely ideal for our school's Parent/Teacher Interview bookings, except for that one little problem: bookings can be set for a minimum of 15 minutes!

Our interview slots are only 5 minutes long to make sure we can get through all the students!

I would suggest bringing it all the way down to 1 minute minimum as we have another area of the school that does groups of 4 parents together, and asks them to book one slot of 3:00, 3:01, 3:02, and 3:03; or the next slots at 3:30, 3:31, 3:32, 3:33, etc.

This one limitation looks like the only reason we could not use this new appointment scheduling function; and would instead have to continue paying large amounts of money to a third-party booking platform that creates the same 5 or 1 minute appointments in Google Calendar anyway.

Please please please amend this limitation so that we can use this great new feature!

PS: the blog post help links for appointment scheduling all link to 'support.corp.google.com' which wants an internal Google SSO login.

Ngā mihi nui, Tony

[Craig99]

I'd like to endorse Tony's comments. At a secondary school where teachers can be teaching 150 different students, we can only offer 5 minute appoinment slots. This restriction on appointment scheduling (which isn't there in appointment slots) is the only reason why we cannot use this for parent teacher conferences.

Regards

Craig

[djchem]

I would also like to use this feature as we currently use 5 min slots.  We will not be able to use it if the limit is not lowered and I am concerned we will be left with nothing and will have to switch to an alternative solution altogether.

regards

Frank

[aabele]

We are completely unable to use the feature for this very reason - expanding parent-teacher nights which already run very late for staff by 50% (we typically have 10min slows) isn't possible ...

Really hope this feature arrives soon - can we get an update? Being considered? On roadmap? Under dev?

[ajojose333333]

@aabele  Please upvote this feature idea :

https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Feature-Ideas/Appointment-Schedule-minimum-time-limit/idi-p/...

Or

You might want to post this to the Feature Ideas section here. Doing so will allow it to be upvoted by others and possibly considered as a future feature enhancement.

If you do not already have access, you need to request it first. See https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/custom/page/page-id/Workspace-Feature-Ideas-FAQ#:~:text=How%... for how to do that.

Once you have access, go to https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Feature-Ideas/gh-p/workspace-ideas-group . There, you can upvote and comment on any similar idea, or post a new idea.

[tbigby]

Thank you @ajojose333333 , I wasn't aware of that, have upvoted that idea indeed.

Ngā mihi, Tony

[aseidel]

Does anyone have a solution to the 5-minute problem?

[tbigby]

Kia ora @aseidel , if I had heard anything upcoming it would be covered under NDA, so I wouldn't be able to say anything about it. I don't see anything listed on the public Feature Releases Calendar: https://workspace.google.com/whatsnew/

If you're not aware, each Google Workspace organisation can sign up one administrator to the private 'Customer Connect' group by signing up to the NDA, where future changes are discussed. I can't find any public page saying how to get signed up, but I recall when I signed up I had to make a request to Google Workspace Support as a Workspace Admin.

Ngā mihi, Tony

[tbigby]

Kia ora @aseidel and everyone,

I'm pleased to see that the '5-minute minimum' has now been announced in the Workspace Updates public blog below. It should be coming to your account in the next month.

https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/10/new-google-calendar-appointment-schedule-settings.ht...

Thank you all for your support in getting Google to make this change happen!

Ngā mihi nui, Tony