Salesforce Scheduler

Salesforce Scheduler (formerly known as Lightning Scheduler) gives you the tools you need to simplify appointment scheduling in Salesforce. Create a personalized experience by scheduling customer appointments—in person, or by phone or video—with the right person at the right place and time.

Enabling Event Management for Salesforce Scheduler

When you enable the Event Management setting under Salesforce Scheduler settings, Salesforce Scheduler writes service resources’ appointments as events on their Salesforce calendar. To write events from Salesforce calendar to external calendars, use a calendar sync tool such as Einstein Activity Capture (EAC).

If a calendar sync tool doesn’t work for you, you can explore Platform Events and APIs related to the specific external calendar tool that you want to be externally synced with Events created in salesforce. For the sake of this article we will limit our conversations around EAC.

Einstein Activity Capture

Einstein Activity Capture (EAC) helps keep data between Salesforce and external email and calendar applications (like Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar) up to date. Objects that can be synched using EAC include Tasks, Events, Contacts and Emails. This article will NOT cover the configuration of EAC, however will limit our conversations around events, since Scheduler “Event Management” is limited to the scope of only synching service appointments to Events.

Configurations to watch out between both applications when using Salesforce Scheduler

1. Whenever a service appointment is created in “Salesforce Scheduler”, if the “Event Management” feature is turned ON, a related Event is created and added to the user’s Salesforce Calendar. For the EAC event sync directions – “Salesforce to External (Microsoft or Google or Similar)” and “Synch Both ways”; this implies that the said event will be synced to the user’s external calendar application (Microsoft or Google or Similar).
   1. Events that are created by the Salesforce scheduler when a service appointment is created are restricted from editing on Salesforce. Guidelines need to be setup on updating these events on an external calendar (after they are synced from Salesforce to external).
   2. If a user tries editing these events on an external calendar and tries to sync back to Salesforce – EAC will NOT be able to update existing event on the Salesforce Calendar, user needs to resolve these errors later by retaining original time as recorded on Salesforce.
   3. To understand what fields on the Service Appointment are mapped to create the Event record – Refer the field mapping table in the help documentation https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=ls_enable_event_mgmt.htm&type=5&language=en_US
   4. We will try to cover about mapping custom fields on the service appointment to the Event in a future blog
2. For the EAC event sync directions – “External (Microsoft or Google or Similar) to Salesforce” and “Synch Both ways”; this implies that the events created in the external calendar application will be synched to Salesforce and related events would be created in Salesforce and will be viewable on the Salesforce calendar. When a scheduling flow executes, the system will look at the scheduling policy assigned to the Flow, and during that time if the system finds that the scheduling policy setting “Check Salesforce Calendar for Resource Availability” is turned ON, Scheduler will exclude the booked slots (of external synched events) along with existing Service Appointments booked for the resource and ONLY show the overall available slots in the Time Slot selection screen.

References:

Scheduler – https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.ls_event_mgmt_overview.htm&type=5
EAC – https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.einstein_sales_aac.htm&type=5
Events and EAC – https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.aac_guidelines_sync.htm&type=5