Scheduling with cal.com

Last week, I attempted to schedule a session with Victoria using the planner in the dashboard. I selected the time and put in the necessary information. No session was created in the LL dashboard. However, I received two emails from cal.com saying that the session was scheduled. Cal.com added the session to my Outlook calendar automatically, but it included a link to a video chat in the cal.com platform (and not to a chat in LL). Before today's session, clicked again on the planner; Victoria did not show as available at the time when the session was scheduled.

There are two issues:

• scheduling using the planner in the dashboard doesn't create an upcoming session in LL (but it does create one in cal.com and adjusts the tutor's availability as such)
• the link in the automatic calendar event is confusing for students because it does not direct them to LL and instead to a video chat platform

assigned to @bridubois

added Bug To do labels

changed milestone to %0.3: Improved User Experience

changed milestone to %0.2: Essential functions ready & corrective feedback

Perhaps I misunderstood what 'essential functions ready (corrective feedback)' meant, but when Victoria and I tried again using the scheduling system, I got the same results – nothing shows up in LL, I received two confirmation emails each with a link to a cal.com video chat.

The new logic should fix most of it. However, the cal.com video chat link is depending of the configuration of cal.com by the tutor. I will add a few words about that in the documentation, thank you!

mentioned in issue #95 (closed)

Last commits 4503ef16 and 4c8ca8a7 implements a new logic to schedule a session with cal.com. Now, the tutor will have to set it's availabilities no more in LanguageLab, but directly on Cal.com. Also, the steps to add it's cal.com link here is way easier, as their is no more "callback" to setup manually.

Here is a preview of what it does for now:

ll

Before merging it into the main branch, I still have to:

• Do more checks to avoid errors (done)
• Tell to the user if everything worked (it's already the case if it's not) (done)
• Automatically refresh the page to show the new session. (may be related to #98 (closed)) (done)
• Update the helper for the tutors (partially done, should probably be more developed, cf #66)

Feel free to share any thought or improvement's idea

added waiting label and removed Bug To do labels

mentioned in commit 4c8ca8a7

changed title from Scheduling with cal.com doesn't create session, sends link to video chat to Scheduling with cal.com

@VictoriaDemierbe & @TylerDickinson, could you test the new session scheduler? Hopefully, it will finally work now.

added To review label

mentioned in issue #98 (closed)

Alas, I got the same result today as before: two confirmation emails, link to cal.com video chat, nothing in the LL dashboard.

Here's the booking page:

I note that it says 'Cal Video' on the left. Also, it's strange that Victoria's availability is given in 43 minute increments.

Here's the confirmation page after I make the booking:

Here's the auto-event generated by Outlook through the confirmation email:

And here's the confirmation email itself (which I received twice, both emails exactly the same):

@bridubois Could you explain in more details what I should do to make it work? I followed your instructions (I've found them here on another ticket) but it didn't seem to work. Also, I don't know why but each time Tyler books a session, the emails we receive indicate that I am the one inviting him to join a session, while he is the guest.

To your latter remark, I think it's like if I were to say 'Hey, let's get together at my place. Here are some dates and times when I'm free. What works best for you?' You'd pick one of them, but I'm still the host (and you're still the guest). The same kind of thing happens in Teams/Meet/Skype/Zoom/etc. – the person creating the event slots is the host, and those who select the event slots are the guests.

Sure! Here is a longer video, where I do the whole thing, both on the tutor side and the student side. As you can see, the value to use come from the "URL" field, but without the cal.com. Only username/meeting_name.

demo

As far as I know, the fact that you're the one inviting is because you let @TylerDickinson pick a free slot in your schedule, but you're still the organizer. The idea behind cal.com (that we just use as-is here) is to set up your availabilities on the cal.com directly, then let some else (@TylerDickinson here) pick one.

The duration and location issue experienced by @TylerDickinson also come from the cal.com's configuration. On the "Event setup" page, you can define a duration (1h in my case, probably 43 mins in yours) and a location ("Video call" by default, which send a video chat link, as you experience right now, but you can set something else). Here is by example my configuration, with the languagelab's site as "location":

I also manually removed the contact's duplicate, as I was not able to reproduce it, I think it's an "old" bug that would not arrive anymore today.

Thank you very much @bridubois ! One last question (I don't remember if I've already asked it or not, but in any case, I can't find the answer): how come I cannot book a session with Tyler myself? I am able to do so with Lucie or Serge, but never with Tyler. Is that normal?

@TylerDickinson , I've followed the instructions, so it should be working now. Could you try to book our next session again? The 43-minute format was an error. I was able to change it. My bad! Thank you!

Indeed, to book a session, it's looking into the other person's calendar. As tyler don't have a cal.com calendar (as, at least for now, it's only for teachers) you can't book a session.

It should probably be opened in a new issue, but I see multiple ways to improve that:

• Let only the student book a session (as it is for now, but maybe remove the button on the teacher side?)
• Detect that it's a student contact and offer self calendar (but it may seems strange to do so? Or at least not always very natural)
• Allow students to also provide a cal.com account and calendar, and let the teacher also choose between the student's availabilities
• Kind of different, but the main reason I could see this scenario is for recurrent sessions (let say every Monday at 10AM). We could provide to the teacher a way to set up a recurrent session.

Any thought? Thank's for the feedback!

I booked a session with @VictoriaDemierbe for tomorrow. Good news is that it now shows up in my LL dashboard. Bad news is that there's still a cal.com video chat link, and I still receive two identical confirmation emails.

Victoria, 11:00 was the earliest time available in the list. I don't know if that's because of the timezone difference (10:00 your time is 11:00 my time), or if it's because we already have a session scheduled at 10:00 in cal.com, so it considered you as busy then.

Video link is related to @VictoriaDemierbe 's cal.com config and double confirmation email seems to be a known cal.com issue https://github.com/calcom/cal.com/issues/11575, so I don't think there is much we can do for it. Can you try to book with another user?

I confirm that we were able to book a session via cal.com, now that I have followed your instructions. I think we can let only the student book a session and delete that option on the teachers' screen. That seems logical. I also agree that for recurrent sessions, it could be convenient to follow another process. Thank you again, Brieuc!

@TylerDickinson , I've changed the location. You can now try with another account.

closed

removed To review label

removed waiting label

@VictoriaDemierbe was able to set the location link and I have been able to schedule a session with her using both my accounts. These sessions appear in the LL dashboard and the calendar link is to LanguageLab.

As previously mentioned, when I scheduled today's session, 10:00 was not available in Victoria's schedule. Because I was able to schedule a 10:00 session now for the 7th November, I think this must have been because I had already scheduled 10:00-10:43 with her, which removed that from her availability (despite it not showing up in the LL dashboard).

Thus today's session was scheduled from 11:00-12:00. Neither Victoria nor I were able to send messages in that session until 10:00 exactly. I don't know if this was intended, but it's a good feature – it allows the chat to start a little early if needed.

We're interested to see what will happen on the 7th at 11:00 (with the session being scheduled from 10:00-11:00) – will it cut us off at 11:00? Or will we be able to keep chatting?

With my other account, I scheduled a session with Victoria on 7 November at 11:00. Everything went fine. I notice that the two emails I received are in fact slightly different: one is the confirmation of the booking (same as the webpage that displays after scheduling the session), and the other is 'from' Victoria with the details about the booking. I then clicked 'cancel' in the email to cancel the session. It was cancelled, and I received a confirmation email to that effect; 11:00 now shows up as available in her cal.com scheduling; but the session still shows up in the LL dashboard.

For the second week in November, I will schedule a session with her using my second account immediately after the session using my main account. The idea here is to test what happens at the end of the first session when she has a second session scheduled: will it cut us off so that she can go to the second session, or will we be able to keep chatting when the second session starts?

It is indeed an expected behavior. Sessions are writable from one hour before to one hour after their schedule. We could increase this time, but for me it seems a fair duration.

The current cal.com integration only rely on the LanguageLab's website, which means that we don't receive any information from cal.com directly, when a session is edited/canceled. From what I saw in their API, it may be possible to implement such features, but I wonder if it would worth the effort, as in such cases it's always possible to just ignore the cancelled session. I would describe this as a "Nice to have" feature (probably to be defined in a new issue).

For your last question, for now, every session is completely independent from each other (that's also why so see her as offline if she is in another session). This also means that you should be able to write to the two sessions from one hour before to one hour after their respective scheduled time.

Thank you a lot for your feedbacks!

Thanks for the information, Brieuc!

Yes, indeed, +/- 1 hour is plenty of time. We just weren't sure what would happen, but if that's built in, no problem. Basically we just wanted to be sure that it wouldn't cut off at the end of the scheduled session.

For the cancellation/rescheduling, I do think it would be useful from the user perspective if the LL dashboard updates to reflect only the scheduled sessions, otherwise it can be confusing, especially if there are multiple scheduled sessions (whether for the student and for the tutor). Maybe there could be a separate section for 'cancelled'?

Thank's! Closed in favor of #120.