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From Chris Albanese: VRA Scheduling – Use Salesforce Scheduler and Visual Remote Assistant to provide virtual meetings

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Salesforce Visual Remote Assistant (VRA) allows you to provide immediate assistance to your customers and employees over video chat. You can find much more information on VRA on Salesforce’s website at https://www.salesforce.com/products/service-cloud/features/visual-remote-assistant/

With the Winter ’22 release, VRA introduced a new feature to facilitate the scheduling of virtual appointments between agents or mobile workers and customers with Visual Remote Assistant. This means that if you are using Salesforce Field Service (SFS) or Salesforce Scheduler (Scheduler) you can now have VRA meetings automatically generated and shared with your customer at the time of appointment scheduling. For example, your customer can create an appointment today for a meeting next Tuesday at 9:00AM. When the appointment is created, the customer is sent a link for the Virtual Meeting that they will use at the time of the meeting.

Check out some more details on this below.

What comes in the VRA Scheduling package?

For customers who have purchased VRA and either SFS or Scheduler or both:

  • A separate managed package installed on top of VRA that contains the VRA Scheduling capabilities
    • Experience Cloud Lobby Component
      • for the user to await the start of the meeting
    • Service Appointment Component for VRA Scheduling
      • generates pop up reminder at time of appointment when the agent opens the Service Appointment
    • Custom Notification
      • to remind the Service Appointment Assigned Resource (agent) of their upcoming meeting
    • Session Lobby Invite object
    • Additions to the Visual Configuration setup screens to manage this feature
  • See VRA Installation and Configuration Manual and VRA Admin Manual for more info

Quick Video of it in action

See this video which illustrates what it can look like after a few simple configuration steps

Setting up VRA Scheduling for Salesforce Scheduler

Preliminary Things

  • Make sure Scheduler is enabled in your org
  • Determine when you want to generate VRA Scheduled Appointments
    • For example, if a user selects an Appointment Type of Video this would trigger the creation of the VRA Lobby Link
  • Plan a confirmation and reminder strategy
    • VRA Scheduling comes with a flow that you can use to send the initial confirmation via email
    • You may want to also send a reminder notification to your customer prior to the meeting, such as 1 hour before
  • Enable Digital Engagement so you can send SMS messages for the confirmation and reminder notifications
  • Install the latest versions of the packages

Object Model Changes

I made 2 small changes to the Service Appointment Object to add 2 text fields. This was done to simplify the sending of an SMS Message to the customer when scheduling a new virtual Service Appointment.

  • First Name – this text field stores the first name of the contact associated with the Service Appointment
  • Lobby Link – this text field stores the Session Lobby Invite url

Flow Setup

VRA Manage Lobby Invites
Configure the flow called VRA Manage Lobby Invites to meet your needs. This flow is configured out of the box to create, update and delete Session Lobby Invites based on the life cycle of a Service Appointment. You need to tailor the trigger criteria and the decision criteria to meet your needs.

Trigger Criteria
The flow triggers on Service Appointment and provides criteria that you can tailor. For Scheduler, I removed the work type criteria that is present and replaced it with Appointment Type = Virtual. Whenever a Service Appointment with Appointment Type = Virtual, this flow will fire.

Out of the Box Trigger Criteria

My criteria which is based on Appointment Type. Only Service Appointments with Appointment Type = video (this is the API value for Virtual meetings) will trigger this flow

Decision Criteria
The out of the box flow will create Session Lobby Link records when the Service Appointment is Dispatched. This applies nicely for Salesforce Field Service. For Scheduler, this may or may not apply, so edit this accordingly. I left this as is and created a supplemental flow (below this screen shot).

Supplemental Flow
I created an additional flow to accomplish 2 things: 1) make sure the SA has an email and phone saved to it and 2) change the status to Dispatched. This is to trigger the VRA Manage Lobby Invites flow.

It’s a triggered flow on SA whenever the SA is created and the Contact Id is present but the email address is not

Overview of flow. It retrieves the contact record from the SA and then updates the SA’s status, email and phone.

Update the SA status, email and phone

Session Lobby Link update flow
This is an additional flow which updates the lobby link to precisely share with the customer the experience site page containing the Lobby component. Out of the box, the link generated points to the experience site home page. This flow allowed me to put the Lobby component on a specific experience site page. This is not required, but it provided me with flexibility to put the lobby component on any page.

Overview of flow. Note that the last step is a Messaging Notification action to send an SMS message to the customer.

Updating the Lobby Link to the desired experience site page

Details of the formula used. It’s a simple text substitution to insert the specific experience site page. In my example, I placed the lobby component on a page called vra-lobby, so I’ve inserted that value into the url.

Updating the Service Appointment. In this step, I retrieve the Service Appointment using the Session Lobby Invite field called Record Id (not to be confused with Id). I’m updating my 2 custom fields to make the SMS messaging template easier to construct.

Messaging Template

This is the template I used. You can see I’m using the custom fields I created for First Name and the Lobby Link as well as the appointment start time.

Experience Cloud Changes

This was a simple change. I added a new page to my experience site called vra-lobby. I placed the Lobby Component on that page. I made sure that the page was accessible to a guest user.

Service Appointment Page Reminder Component

Add the Service Appointment reminder component to the Service Appointment page. This component requires no parameters. It generates a pop up notification when opening the SA to remind the user there is a virtual session that needs to start.

Summary

VRA Scheduling makes it easy to provide customers with links to a 2 way video session when scheduling an appointment.

Additional Notes about this Example

This is just a concept illustrator. You may want to add additional logic to your flows to send reminders to the customer along the channel of their choice. I’ve used SMS in my example, but making this more generic to support additional channels is recommended.

Appointment Reminders for the customer are not depicted in this example, but these would be easy to set up with a flow.

From Sunil Kumar Nandipati: Salesforce Scheduler with Einstein Activity Capture

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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

From Shantinath Patil: Schedule a support advisor

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Let’s think of you as a support agent. You get a call from a customer asking for an appointment for some questions he has on the case and wants to talk with the case owner. So what can do you What will you do in this “case?”

Salesforce Scheduler can help you in this “case”. Let’s drill down on what all we need to accomplish this:

  1. Case owner as a Service Resource
  2. Case reference to Appointment
  3. A flow
  4. Quick action on Case to initiate the flow.

A logical flow of the approach we will take in this use case will look like the following:

Get Case Details

Since this flow will run on the case, we need to get the details of it. First, we can set the “recordId” input parameter to get the current case, automatically giving us the case Id. Then, using this variable, we can query the case using the “Get Records” element in the flow.

Note that we need AccountId to map it to the ParentRecordId of the Service Appointment. OwnerId is needed to get the related Service Resource.

If we want to tag the current CaseId, we can create a new lookup on Service Appointment. A custom field is needed since Service Appointment can only support Account, Lead, and Opportunity except for Case! To ensure that value is populated in that lookup, we can override the JSON we pass in the final Save Action defined in the flow. For more details, you can refer to the blog here: https://unofficialsf.com/build-your-own-appointment-review-screen/. For now, we can skip it.

Get Service Resource

If we want to set the case owner as of the person who will work on this case, we need to make sure that he is a service resource. For more details, please check this help doc: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.ls_create_resources.htm&type=5.

To fetch the service resource, we can add the “Get Records” element like below. In this, we are fetching Service Resource based on Case OwnerId.

Leverage filterByResourceIds

Scheduler flow allows you to filter the resources based on the list of Ids you pass to it. You can read more details here: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.ls_enable_service_resource_filtering.htm&type=5.

We can leverage this functionality for our use case. Since we want our case owner to be the Service Resource, we can add the Service Resource Id from the previous step to filterByResourceIds. Additionally, we can make anonymous booking as true and resource booking as false. This will make sure that we skip the OOB triage screen and resource selection screen.

The advantage we get from this is if the case owner is not a Service Resource, existing logic will fetch any available resource anonymously. You will not have to worry about resource selection. End to end experience will be very seamless for the agent who is booking that appointment.

Once all the nodes and assignment is done, you can test the flow using the “Debug” option and activate it once it’s working as expected.

Setup

After this step, it’s up to you how you want to distribute the flow. For this blog, we are using Case Action to create a new appointment. Since the “recordId” flow variable is set for “Available for input” in the flow, this action will automatically set it to the current record on the detail page.

You can add this action to the case layout. The end-to-end flow should work something like this:

We have added all the metadata to this git repo for your reference. Please feel free to deploy it to your Sandboxes and try it out! Link: https://github.com/snathpatil/case-appointment-booking

Note if you’re looking for a virtual advisor then do have a look at this blog: https://unofficialsf.com/tele-or-virtual-scenarios-using-salesforce-scheduler/

Scheduler is not to be positioned in cases where the Service Resource is travelling to a customer’s location

Tele or virtual Scenarios using Salesforce Scheduler

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Salesforce Scheduler can be used to cover Tele scenario or Virtual scenarios too. Here is how…

Setup Steps

1. Create a Virtual Territory

Create a single territory which will be treated as a Virtual Territory and add your resources in here

2. Skip Territory flow

Click here to see how one can Skip the territory selection and hardcode the flow to select a virtual territory

3. Integrate with external Video conferencing providers

a. Click here to integrate Scheduler with Webex

b. Click here for Visual Remote Assistant

c. Click here for Amazon Chime

d. Click here for Zoom

e. Click here for Microsoft teams

Note: There are other models too where you could have the same resource in multiple territories as a secondary resource. Now if a customer selects a face to face appointment, you could call a scheduling policy with only only Primary Resources flag and if your customer selects a video / phone call you could also have the Secondary Resources flag checked which will allow this customer to setup meetings with all your primary and secondary resources, there by giving you additional capacity.

Performance Considerations

Precision scheduling is a performance intensive affair and it considers several different elements while coming up with the available time slots – skills, skill levels, resource holidays, working hours, location, etc.

Performance improvements tips

1.Remove Event checks in Scheduling Policy

If you are not checking Salesforce Calendar for Resource Availability then disable it.

2.Reduce Time range

Reducing the time range that you fetch the Resources & Time Slots for, helps improve the performance of the Scheduler algorithm and allows you to query more eligible resources. Using this mechanism, you have certain controls present

Flows: Use Time slot multiplier to reduce the number of days you are querying for from 14 (default) to 7 by reducing this Time Slot Multiplier flow variable to 1. Click here for details

APIs: Use Start Time & End Time to reduce the number of days you are querying the system for (default is 31 days.) Click here for details

3.Appointment Distribution

Using the new capability introduced in Winter 22: Appointment Distribution

One of the biggest bottlenecks is the number of resources whose calendar needs to be checked. As the number of eligible resources increases, Salesforce scheduler takes longer to fetch the resource list. For a 14 day period it is recommended that we keep around 20 eligible / qualified resources ie: In other words 20 resources with the same skill in the service territory if you are using the out of the box flows.

If the above doesn’t give you the performance boost needed then consider the new capability introduced in Winter 22 which will only look for the calendar of the x least utilised resources at that point and hence circumvent this problem.
Since you are considering the least utilised resources and showing up their slots, you will likely get most of the available slots and automatically balance the workload of your resources.

Here x is configurable(Click here for release notes)
Use the new Number of Resources to Show (Appointment Distribution) attribute in flows. This attribute is available in the Select Service Resource, Select Service Appointment Time, and Select Service Resource and Service Appointment Time screen components. If you’re using APIs, use the resourceLimitApptDistribution parameter. This parameter is available in the getAppointmentCandidates REST API and the available-territory-slots Connect API.

A simple test allowed me to manage a territory of 300 resources too using this feature on the flows shipped with the product, as long as I restricted the number of eligible resources (x) to 20.

Note: The above figure could change based on customisations and the specific data shape so would recommend running a test or proof of concept on your specific setup before moving ahead.

From Apeksh Dave: Setting up Webex Meetings with Salesforce Scheduler

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  • Use Case
    • Company ABC LLC wants to have a self-service tool to allow the customer to schedule an appointment in person or via virtual conference (Voice/Video) to have a more interactive experience
      • COVID crisis has amplified the need to do video conferencing
    • Company ABC LLC wants to have the flexibility to send a notification to customer about the appointment
      • if Virtual appointment send virtual conferencing links
    • Company ABC LLC wants the flexibility to allow to add Cohost for a virtual conference or add additional invite on the customer side (eg: Spouse/friend) or employee side (Specialist, Product manager, etc) on a virtual conference – This is optional

  • Technology Considered
    • Salesforce Scheduler
    • Webex Virtual Conferencing when a customer chooses to do Virtual Conference ( Voice/Video)
      • Leveraging Webex API v1

  • Personas
    • Customer scheduling meeting ( in person /Virtually) and Customer’s Addl. invitee
    • Employee as Host/CoHost
    • Employee as additional Attendee

  • User Flow
    • Client/Company is leveraging Salesforce Scheduler to schedule appointments in person or virtual from available spots
    • Clients’ Customer clicks on Schedule an Appointment
    • He inputs his basic information (name, email and phone) and selects the in-person or virtual option
    • He picks up time and date and clicks next
      • For a virtual appointment, SF will send WEBEX API call with Oauth token, meeting invite details ( title, day, time, meetingpassord etc) along with Customer/invitee information (name and email)
      • Webex will create a meeting and send API response with a Webex link and behind the scene notify the Customer and host ( For host it leverages email tied to user associated for authentiication )
        • optionally add multiple regular invitee/cohost invitee during creation
      • TechnicalComponent Flow
        • Salesforce Lightning scheduler Flow → Apex → Webex API (Oauth Flow ). .
        • Salesforce- Webex OpenID/Oauth integration is leveraged for Authentication/Authorization purpose

  • Deep Dive and Develop Steps
    • Step 1: Setup Salesforce Org and Webex Account
    • Step 2: Setup Oauth in Webex and Salesforce
      • Step 2a: Verify Webex Oauth Setup via Postman Webex Collection
    • Step 3: Setup/Verify Oauth with Salesforce
    • Step 4: Invoke Webex API…Invoke Webex API vai Apex/Named Cred
  • Optional steps outside of Scheduler
    • Optional – SF will make Webex API call outside of scheduler with employee information as Co host/invitee or it can make Webex API call to add additional invitee on the customer side or employee side without being co-host
    • Edit Existing Webex invite by Adding Specialist banker as Cohost
  • How can i troubleshoot with Postman
  • Step 1 -Pre Requisite
    • Get Salesforce Org where you can run flows
    • Email id ( preferably new one so it does not have webex account on this from your corporation side )
    • Webex Developer Account to Create meetings
      • How to get this
        • Send email to devsupport@webex.com to create Trial Account with License with your Name and email address
        • Account userid( your email id ) and steps to setup password will be sent to your Email id
        • TIPS
          • If you just go to webex and create webex account it will NOT work
          • if you have Corp userid/pwd with Webex it may not work
    • Verify your userid and pwd works
      • Go to https://developer.webex.com/docs/api/v1/meetings/create-a-meeting
      • Top right corner .. Login with your Email and pwd
        • Use Bearer Token generated toggle button ( BTW u can use this in Postman if u want )
        • Title – Sample Meeting
        • Password – SFSchFlow123
        • Start – 2020-06-25T11:00:00-04:00 ( Use this format )
        • End – 2020-06-25T12:00:00-04:00. (Use this format)
        • Invitee – {“email”: “XXXXX@XXXXXX.com”,”displayName”: “Apeksh Dave”,”coHost”: false}
      • Click Run
      • Response
        • it will create meeting with webex URL
        • It will send meeting invite
      • Common errors
        • Unauthorized – Token expired – Re login
        • Bad request. – Most probably u did not put Start and end properly or invitee format was messed up
        • Start time is after end time ( vice versa)

  • Step 2a -Verify Webex Oauth Setup via Postman Webex Collection -OPTIONAL
    • Run in Postman
      • Environment variables are already set ( {{MEETINGS_API_URL}} , “{{TIMEZONE_STRING}}”
    • Go to Create non recurring meetings
      • Tab – Authorization
        • Pick Oauth 2.0 .. Get New Access Token
        • Add Authorization headers. – Request Headers
          • Populate following
  • Step 3 – Setup/Verify Oauth with Salesforce
    • Setup Auth provider in salesforce
      • Setup – Auth provider
        • Create OpenID Connect
  • Make sure the Callback url salesforce exactly in Webex integration Redirect URI ( Single space can be problem)
    • Setup Named Credential and Remote settings using Authprovider
      • Create new and populate accordingly
        • URL https://webexapis.com/v1/meetings
        • Id type -Named principal
        • Auth protocol. – Oauth. 2.0
        • Scope spark:kms meeting:schedules_write
        • click on Checkbox – Start auth on Save
image.png
image.png
  • When you Save it
        • it will invoke USERid and pwd for the Webex Dev account you create
          • if successfull
            • it will say Authorized
        • Common Errors
          • Endpoint uri mismatch
            • Salesforce Callback url MUST match Webex Redirect URL. in dev account
          • if Userid screen comes up but says No Oauth Generated
            • Salesforce Auth provider -Uncheck –Send client credentials in header
  • Step 4 -Invoke Webex API vai Apex/Named Cred
    • Apex Code with @InvocableMethod for flows (Sample Apex code – Not Prod ready)
      • GetWebexMeetingURLv1
      • global class GetWebexMeetingURLv1 {
        @InvocableMethod(label='Get Webex Meeting URL v1 Sample flow' description='Returns Unique
        URL v1 Sample flow')
        global static List<String> makeApiCallout(List<List<String>> inputwebexParms) {
        Http httpProtocol = new Http();
        HttpRequest request = new HttpRequest();
        system.debug('Array size =' + inputwebexParms.get(0).size());
        String inTitle = '"' + inputwebexParms.get(0).get(0) + '"';
        system.debug('inTitle =' + inTitle);
        String inAgenda = '"' + inputwebexParms.get(0).get(0) + '"';
        system.debug('inAgenda =' + inAgenda);
        String inWebexPwd = '"' + inputwebexParms.get(0).get(1) + '"';
        system.debug('inWebexPwd =' + inWebexPwd);
        String inStart = '"' + inputwebexParms.get(0).get(2) + '"';
        system.debug('inStart =' + inStart);
        String inEnd = '"' + inputwebexParms.get(0).get(3) + '"';
        system.debug('inEnd =' + inEnd);
        String inInviteeEmail = '"' + '"';
        String inInviteeName = '"' + '"';
        if (inputwebexParms.get(0).size() == 6)
        {
        inInviteeEmail = '"' + inputwebexParms.get(0).get(4) + '"';
        system.debug('inInviteeEmail =' + inInviteeEmail);
        inInviteeName = '"' + inputwebexParms.get(0).get(5) + '"';
        system.debug('inInviteeName =' + inInviteeName);
        }
        String reqInviteeString = '"invitees": [{"email": ' + inInviteeEmail + ',"displayName": ' + inInviteeName+ ',"coHost": true}]';
        system.debug('reqInviteeString =' + reqInviteeString);

        String endpoint = 'callout:XXXXXWebex';
        request.setEndPoint(endpoint);
        request.setMethod('POST');
        request.setHeader('Content-Type', 'application/json');
        String reqHTTPString = '';
        if (inInviteeEmail.length() > 4 )
        reqHTTPString = '{"title": '+ inTitle + ',"agenda": ' + inAgenda + ',"password": ' + inWebexPwd +
        ',"start": ' + inStart + ',"end": ' + inEnd + ',"enabledAutoRecordMeeting":
        false,"allowAnyUserToBeCoHost": true,' + reqInviteeString + '}';
        else
        reqHTTPString = '{"title": '+ inTitle + ',"agenda": ' + inAgenda + ',"password": ' + inWebexPwd +
        ',"start": ' + inStart + ',"end": ' + inEnd + ',"enabledAutoRecordMeeting":
        false,"allowAnyUserToBeCoHost": true}';

        System.debug(reqHTTPString);
        request.setBody(reqHTTPString);
        HttpResponse response = httpProtocol.send(request);
        System.debug(response.getBody());
        JSONParser parser = JSON.createParser(response.getBody());
        String webLink;
        webLink = 'WebexNotSetup';
        while (parser.nextToken() != null) {
        if ((parser.getCurrentToken() == JSONToken.FIELD_NAME) &&
        (parser.getText() == 'id')) {
        parser.nextToken();
        webLink = parser.getText();
        system.debug('webLink =' + webLink);
        }
        }
        return new List<String>{webLink};
        }
        }

  • Flow invokes code (Will get DX info )
image.png

  • Salesforce Salesforce Scheduler calls this subflow
image.png
  • How can i Edit Webex Invite – Add Specialist banker as Cohost
  • Add Specialist banker as Cohost AFTER webex meeting is scheduled
image.png
  • Create FLOW and call Apex code
    • Leverage MeetingID you got in
    • Leverage new named credential and send the request as below
      • inInviteeEmail, inInviteeName, inMeetingID with cohost=true
    • Populate ‘{“email”: ‘ + inInviteeEmail + ‘,”displayName”: ‘ + inInviteeName + ‘,”meetingId”: ‘ + inMeetingID + ‘,”coHost”: true}’;

How to setup Postman with Webex for Troubleshooting – Optional

image.png
  • Headers
image.png

  • Body
    • {
      "title": "Sample Title",
      "agenda": "Sample Agenda",
      "password": "P@ssword123",
      "start": "{{_start_time}}",
      "end": "{{_end_time}}",
      "timezone": "{{TIMEZONE_STRING}}",
      "enabledAutoRecordMeeting": false,
      "allowAnyUserToBeCoHost": false,
      "invitees": [
      {
      "email": "xxxxxx@xxxxx.com",
      "displayName": "xxxxxx Dave",
      "coHost": false
      }
      ]
      }
  • Response
    • {
      "id": "eXXXXXX571a84047da9662725e4fXXXXXXX",
      "meetingNumber": "1463039999",
      "title": "Sample Title",
      "agenda": "Sample Agenda",
      "password": "P@ssword123",
      "meetingType": "meetingSeries",
      "state": "active",
      "timezone": "America/New_York",
      "start": "2020-06-24T12:00:00-04:00",
      "end": "2020-06-24T12:30:00-04:00",
      "hostUserId": "Y2lzY29zcGFyazovL3VzL1BFT1BMRS83Mjc1MjdhNi1iOWE3LTQ5NjYtOTc3YS1hMmFkMmNiZmQyNTA",
      "hostDisplayName": "XXX XXXX",
      "hostEmail": "xxxxxxxx@gmail.com",
      "hostKey": "708678",
      "webLink": "https://xxxxxxxx.webex.com/xxxxxxdemo/j.php?MTID=m18676e904aa243acec205df2248a68fd",
      "sipAddress": "1463999999@xxxxxxxxxxxx.webex.com",
      "dialInIpAddress": "999.99.2.68",
      "enabledAutoRecordMeeting": false,
      "allowAnyUserToBeCoHost": false,
      "telephony": {
      "accessCode": "1463037896",
      "callInNumbers": [
      {
      "label": "US Toll",
      "callInNumber": "+1-999-999-9999",
      "tollType": "toll"
      }
      ],
      "links": [
      {
      "rel": "globalCallinNumbers",
      "href": "/v1/meetings/e43d0571a84047da9662725e4f354ae5/globalCallinNumbers",
      "method": "GET"
      }
      ]
      }
      }
  • Verify with Salesforce Code with Bearer token for Troubleshooting
    • Create Named Credential with no authentication ( as we are passing bearer token )
    • Create Apex class with Bearer Token

Considerations

  1. This blog has been tested with WebEx API version v1
  2. This blog is for a specific scenario where we don’t persist the webex links within Salesforce

References
https://developer.webex.com/blog/real-world-walkthrough-of-building-an-oauth-webex-integration

From: Saikiran Gogurla: Spring 21 Feature: Preset the Territory’s Timezone on the timeslot screen

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The default time zone for all times shown in a Salesforce Scheduler flow would be the timezone set for the user scheduling the appointment. See more details on how this would work for the various flows here.

In Spring 21 feature, a feature provided an ability to (pre)set the timezone across multiple screens on the Outbound, Inbound & Guest User flows (Create & modify) across mobile & desktop.

One common scenario this helps you to cover is, when a Customer care agent is booking an “On-behalf” appointment and wants to see the time-slots in the timezone of their selected territory.

Now, this is easy to achieve with Clicks, not code!


Imagine a customer care agent based in Chicago (Central time) is booking an appointment for a customer who wants to meet a banker in the Denver branch (Mountain time) of Cumulus bank.

Wouldn’t the customer care agent wants to see the time slots in Mountain time automatically and book the appointment?


With Salesforce Scheduler, now the agent can easily look at the available time slots in the bank operating hours timezone by default and book the appointments. Don’t worry about the Timezone in which the territory is operating and all; it is taken care of!!
All the timings shown in my flow are configured to Cumulus Bank (Denver) operating timezone.

Question: What if some other bank is at a different location or any Service Territory for that matter? Will my flow behave like it is configured to that Service Territory dynamically?

Answer: Oh Yes!!

Let’s look at how it is done,

Configuration is the same for Outbound, Inbound, and Guest flows, illustrating for Outbound Flow.

  1. Add a new Assignment Element called Set Territory Timezone, after the Location Screen.
image
  1. Set the DefaultTimeZone variable to Timezone from ServiceTerritory Operating Hours.
Config3.png
  1. Save the flow.

— Now the flow is configured to the timezone based on the Service Territory chosen —

Screens that have an impact :

  1. Candidate Screen now shows Next Availability in the Service Territory Timezone.
Candidate Screen.png
Debug Item.png
  1. Flow Time Slot Screen, now by default shows Time Slots in Territories Timezone.
Time Slot Screen.png
  1. Flow Review Screen shows the selected time slot in the timezone in which Territory Operates.
Review Screen2.png
  1. For Inbound and Guest Flow., Next Availability and Time Slots are configured to Territory Timezone on Resource Time Slot Screen, and it looks like,
Screenshot 2021-06-09 at 5.11.57 PM.png

These are some of the use-cases that can be solved but not limited to,

  • Agents booking on-behalf appointments, want to see all time-slots in territory timezone by default.
  • Branch Managers and above, no matter from where customer books an appointment, he/she visits our site and tries to book appointment and all time-sots should be shown in my Territory supported Timezone by default.
  • Guest appointment booking, are you sending out an email to customer to book an appointment using the link and wants him to see time-slots in your territory timezone?

Your customer will never miss his/her appointment time, when booked with Territory timezone!

From Shantinath Patil: Email signature booking

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THIS CAPABILITY IS COMING WITH THE SALESFORCE SCHEDULER PRODUCT IN SUMMER 22 RELEASE!! CHECK IT OUT

Ever wondered if you can offer a link to your customers to book an appointment with you? Or a situation where you want everything to be preselected, and you will immediately jump to the timeslot screen? Well, wait no more! In this blog, we will show you how you can achieve this!

Let’s consider the first scenario. You give a link to a customer OR add a link to your email signature. Here is what you have to do.

Part 1: Prepare!

We need to build a flow such that our landing page should be the timeslot screen. To make that work, we should be able to populate all the required values. In current out of the box flows, all the screens we traverse are used to populate values required for the timeslot screen. Let’s see what all values we need to populate.

  • Work Type Group: This is the outcome from the OOB Work Type Group Selection page. This helps the internal logic to get which topic/template we are trying to book.
  • Service Territory: This is the location of your appointment.
  • Service Resource: This is the resource that will cater to the appointment request.

Since these values are needed as inputs for our flow, we can create flow variables and mark them available for input.

image.png

Once all these flow variables are created, we can create the assignment for those. Note that we need to assign Service Territory Id to a Service Appointment instance. This makes sense if you look at location screen output. That screen is giving selected territory output as “{!ServiceAppointment.ServiceTerritoryId}”. And since we cannot just set one field on the Service Appointment instance, we will have to initialise all other fields as an empty string. For this, we can refer to the OOB assignment stage.

image.png

The next step is to link all required values to the timeslot screen. Again, we can refer to the OOB timeslot screen configuration. We should be doing the only change to pass our input flow variables for Service Resource and Work Type Group.

image.png

After that, configure the review screen. Make sure you map all the required attributes.

image.png

And finally, we should configure the save action. Here you can pass “{!serviceAppointmentFields}” as input, which is an output of the Review Screen. For now, we are considering invoking this flow for guest flow, so we are adding Lead as input as well.

image.png

Optionally you can configure the confirmation screen. Done! Your flow should be ready to be tested. Save and debug the flow by providing the input attributes!

image.png

Part 2: Distribute!

In a nutshell, we created a flow that takes all the parameters needed for the TimeSlot screen and process it. Once such a flow is ready, we can then use any mechanism of distribution of the flow.

Here is the link to Salesforce documentation which explains to you how can we create a flow page in the community and pass values: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=sf.flow_distribute_internal_url_variable.htm&type=5

This is not the only way! You can even embed the flow in a lightning component and embed that to an external website. More detail: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.lightning.meta/lightning/components_using_flow_inputs_set.htm

If you take the approach of exposing this flow in a public community, consider adding a ReCaptcha. More details: https://unofficialsf.com/protect-a-flow-on-a-public-community-with-the-google-recaptcha-component/

The below demo shows all things in action. You can see that a service resource has sent details to a prospect related to Salesforce Scheduler. That email includes a link. Once the user clicks on the link, they will get redirected to our public community page, which hosts the flow we created from the above steps. All the user have to do it to select a slot, add their details and submit!

Part 3: One More Thing!

Now that we have created a flow that takes input, we surely don’t expect our Service Resources to generate the link manually! Besides, it’s easier to use existing components to build a flow that will give output as an URL to proudly put in their email signature or give to customers! Heck, they can even include that in their digital business cards!

To do this, we will reuse existing OOB components. It’s like the Service Resource will perform initial actions on behalf in OOB flow on behalf of the end-user. Following are the steps to create such a flow:

  1. We will configure the “Generate Signature URL” button on the Service Resource page. From there, one can initiate the signature generation flow. Hence we need “recordId” as an input flow variable.
  2. We will pass this record id to the existing WorkTypeGroup selection page. This will ensure that only the WTGs which are related to that resource are displayed.
  3. Next, configure the Service Territory screen. Here we need Service Resource Id and WTG Id, which will be the output of the previous screen. Having both the inputs will ensure that search results for the territory will give us the correct territory.
  4. Finally, we will generate the URL from all the selection with the help of a formula flow variable. The formula looks like this:
image.png

Note that we have considered the scenario that actual booking flow is configured in a community, hence the “communityURL” variable.

Once you build out the flow, it looks like this:

image.png

Test this flow in the flow debug, and once done, activate it. You can configure a new quick action on Service Resource and add that to its layout.

Both the flows are added to this git repo:https://github.com/snathpatil/signatureflow. You can deploy it to your salesforce org and validate!

From Shantinath Patil: Pre-filling values on the Appointment Review Screen

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So you want to preload some values on the final Review screen provided by Scheduler?

Check this out…


Let’s say you want to prefill the email & phone details.

  1. Set the Email and Phone in the first assignment stage:
image (22).png

2. Assign Service Appointment record variable in the review screen. In an Outbound flow template that input is blank and that’s why making changes only mentioned in step 1 will not work.

image (23).png

That’s it!

image (24).png

Note this method works for the Outbound flow & Inbound flow and is restricted to the following fields:

  • “AdditionalInformation”
  • “AppointmentType”
  • “Comments”
  • “ParentRecordId”
  • “ServiceTerritoryId”
  • “Street”
  • “City”
  • “State”
  • “Country”
  • “PostalCode”
  • “SchedStartTime”
  • “SchedEndTime”
  • “WorkTypeId”
  • “Id”
  • “Description”
  • “Subject”
  • “Phone”
  • “Email”
  • “ContactId”
  • “IsAnonymousBooking”

To prefill other fields or for other flows (eg Guest Flow), you need to do it build your own screen & logic: https://unofficialsf.com/build-your-own-appointment-review-screen/

Also check out other cool changes that you could with the review screen here: Review Appointment screen: Quick Flow Customisations – Salesforce Scheduler

Summer 21 Feature: Specify the Hours that a Resource can work on a particular Topic

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Below is how Operating Hours or Working hours for a Service Resource are determined in Scheduler today.

As you can see the Scheduler’s algorithm considers the intersection of operating hours set at various levels. The Operating Hours set at Service Territory is mandatory but at other levels is optional and an intersection is considered only if the respective operating hour has been added. Typically customers use the Operating Hours set at the Service Territory & Service Territory Member level. Read more about it here

In Summer 21, a feature provides setting up these working hours (or Operating hours are a more granular level.) It allows you to define the Operating Hours that a Service Territory Member can work for a Work Type Group. This helps solve the following needs.

So how does it work?

Now lets take an example of a scenario I would like to model and how the setup would work in Salesforce Scheduler

Scenario

The Market St Branch, San Francisco (Service Territory) is open from 9am to 5pm on Monday to Friday. All appointments are for 60 mins (for simplicity.)

Misha Clayton working as a banker (Service Resource) in this branch has the skills to manage the following topics (Work Type Groups): Investment Banking, Business Banking & General Banking.

Below is her schedule

  • Monday
    • General Banking & Business Banking topics from 10am to 12pm
    • General Banking & Investment Banking topics from 1pm to 3pm
  • Tuesday
    • Business Banking & Investment Banking topic from 10am to 4pm
    • No General Banking appointments
  • Wednesday
    • All topics from 9am to 5pm
  • Thursday
    • Only General Banking from 9am to 5pm
  • Friday
    • Banker does not take any customer appointments on any topics

Setup

First we will setup the Market St Branch working hours by adding the Operating Hours on respective Service Territory

Now we setup Misha’s schedule for the Market St Branch by going into the respective Service Territory Member record and adding the needed Operating Hours

Since Friday doesn’t have any hours setup in this Operating Hours record, Friday hours will not show up for Misha in the Market St Branch.

So lets see what the time slots show up when a customer selects Misha for the Market St Branch for different Work Type Groups

  1. Business Banking

2. General Banking

3. Investment Banking

Similarly, I could have set up Dr John (who has the skills to practice multiple specialities but only practices one speciality in each clinic.)

From Chris Albanese: Summer 21 Feature: Get Resources and Available Time Slots Through New Apex Methods

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Salesforce Scheduler introduced a new feature in the Summer ’21 Release which allows developers to easily make custom time slot screen flow components that interact with external systems. The new Apex methods call the Get Appointment Candidates and Get Appointment Slots APIs. This capability helps you easily get all the service resources and available time slots or get available slots for a resource.

With this new feature developers have the choice of using the Scheduler REST APIs and the Scheduler Apex methods. The REST APIs are a powerful tool that allows you to develop custom user interfaces and applications that run on your own websites. The Apex methods offer a great option for developers building custom UI components and processes that are run by users that are already logged into Salesforce, such as running a Lightning Flow launched from a button on the Account Screen or viewing a page inside of a Salesforce Experience site.

Check this out below.

Calling the Scheduler Get Appointment Candidates API with Apex

Here’s a little concept illustrator to show you how easy it is to call the API using Apex.

Let’s say you want to ask Scheduler to return the next time slot available for a Work Type Group and Territory. The user is a call center user, talking to a customer and the customer says “give me your next available appointment please”.

Solution Architecture

  • A simple Flow embedded on the account page
  • The flow calls an @invocableMethod which uses the new API
  • The method returns the 1st time slot found
  • The flow creates a service appointment using the time slot returned

User Experience

The top left of the 2 screen shots below illustrate how the call center user can ask the scheduler to return the next available time slots and create a service appointment.

image.png
image.png

Screen Flow

As you can see in the screen shot below, the flow is pretty simple. It takes in the account id from the Account Page. It prompts the user for Work Type Group, Territory and Earliest Start Time. It passes these parameters into the Apex Action. If a slot is returned, it creates a service appointment, if not, an informational message is displayed.

image.png

Apex Class

As you probably already know, you can call Apex Methods from a Lightning Flow using the Action component. There are lots of great articles and tips on building @invocableMethods, which I won’t go into here. For this example, the method I created takes in the parameters, calls the Scheduler Apex Method named lxscheduler.SchedulerResources.getAppointmentCandidates, and returns the first result found, or returns nothing if no slots are found.

Receiving the Input Parameters from the Flow

In the example code below, to accept the input parameters from the flow, I created a class called payloadIn. It contains variables for Work Type Group Id, Service Territory Id, Scheduling Policy Id, Account Id and Start Date Time. We use these values to call the Scheduler Method. Variables like Account Id are not mandatory, I’ve just included it in my example.

Setting the Input Parameters in the Apex Method

The Get Appointment Candidates API provides an easy to use class to set the parameters that you want to pass to the Get Appointment Candidates API, lxscheduler.GetAppointmentCandidatesInput. As you can see in the example code, I simply set the parameters to the values passed in from the flow. I’ve hard coded the EndTime to be the Start Time plus 3 days. You can of course change this to be more dynamic.

Calling the Apex Method

It is super simple and is represented by this line in the example code:

String response = lxscheduler.SchedulerResources.getAppointmentCandidates(input);

Note, that no authentication code, connected apps, named credentials and other items are required to call the Apex Method. Since the running user is already authenticated, they can call the Scheduler API, just like they can call any other Apex Method they have access to.

Hooray! This is what is so awesome about this new API and makes code based development for Scheduler so much easier for these types of use cases.

Parsing the Results – they’re different from the REST API results

The method returns the results as a JSON string. I won’t go into the ins and outs of JSON and you can certainly find out more with a quick web search, but what you need to know is that the results from the lxscheduler.SchedulerResources.getAppointmentCandidates call are slightly different from the REST API call.

The REST API call for getAppointmentCandidates returns this format:

{
"candidates" : [ {
"endTime" : "2019-01-23T19:15:00.000+0000",
"resources" : [ "0HnB0000000D2DsKAK" ],
"startTime" : "2019-01-23T16:15:00.000+0000",
"territoryId" : "0HhB0000000TO9WKAW"
}, {
"endTime" : "2019-01-23T19:30:00.000+0000",
"resources" : [ "0HnB0000000D2DsKAK" ],
"startTime" : "2019-01-23T16:30:00.000+0000",
"territoryId" : "0HhB0000000TO9WKAW"
}, {
"endTime" : "2019-01-23T19:45:00.000+0000",
"resources" : [ "0HnB0000000D2DsKAK" ],
"startTime" : "2019-01-23T16:45:00.000+0000",
"territoryId" : "0HhB0000000TO9WKAW"
}]
}

The Apex Method for getAppointmentCandidates returns this format:

{{
"endTime" : "2019-01-23T19:15:00.000+0000",
"resources" : [ "0HnB0000000D2DsKAK" ],
"startTime" : "2019-01-23T16:15:00.000+0000",
"territoryId" : "0HhB0000000TO9WKAW"
}, {
"endTime" : "2019-01-23T19:30:00.000+0000",
"resources" : [ "0HnB0000000D2DsKAK" ],
"startTime" : "2019-01-23T16:30:00.000+0000",
"territoryId" : "0HhB0000000TO9WKAW"
}, {
"endTime" : "2019-01-23T19:45:00.000+0000",
"resources" : [ "0HnB0000000D2DsKAK" ],
"startTime" : "2019-01-23T16:45:00.000+0000",
"territoryId" : "0HhB0000000TO9WKAW"
}
}

Did you notice the difference? The outer wrapper for “candidates: [ …]” is missing from the results, so you need to make sure you deserialize the results using the proper format.

Here’s the class I used to deserialize the results:

public class schedulerCandidates {

    public datetime startTime;
    public datetime endTime;
    public List<String> resources;
    public String territoryId;

    
    public static list<schedulerCandidates> parse(String json) {
        return (list<schedulerCandidates>) System.JSON.deserialize(json, list<schedulerCandidates>.class);
    }
}

Example Code

public with sharing class LXScheduleFirstAvailable {

    @invocableMethod(label='Schedule to First Available' description='Schedule to whomever is next')
    public static list<event> ScheduleIt(list<payloadIn> payloadList ){
        if(payloadList == null || payloadList.size() <> 1) return null;
        payloadIn pl = payloadList[0];
        lxscheduler.GetAppointmentCandidatesInput input = new lxscheduler.GetAppointmentCandidatesInputBuilder()
            .setWorkTypeGroupId(pl.workTypeGroupId)
            .setTerritoryIds(new List<String>{pl.serviceTerritoryId})
            .setStartTime(pl.startDateTime.format('yyyy-MM-dd\'T\'HH:mm:ssZ'))
            .setEndTime(pl.startDateTime.addDays(3).format('yyyy-MM-dd\'T\'HH:mm:ssZ'))
            .setAccountId(pl.accountId)
            .setSchedulingPolicyId(pl.schedulingPolicyId)
            .setApiVersion(Double.valueOf('50.0'))
            .build();
        //call the Apex Method - no REST API authentication or API user needed!!!
        String response = lxscheduler.SchedulerResources.getAppointmentCandidates(input);
        //parse the results using JSON.deserialize
        if(response==null) return null;
        list<schedulerCandidates> allslots = schedulerCandidates.parse(response);
        //slots found, return just the first one
        if(allslots!=null) {
            event thisevent = new event();
            thisevent.startdatetime = allslots[0].startTime;
            thisevent.enddatetime = allslots[0].endTime;
            thisevent.description = allslots[0].territoryId;
            thisevent.whoid = allslots[0].resources[0];
            return new list<event>{thisevent};
        }
        //no slots found, return null
        return null;
    }
    public class payloadIn{
        @invocableVariable(required=true)
        public string workTypeGroupId;
        @invocableVariable(required=true)
        public string serviceTerritoryId;
        @invocableVariable(required=true)
        public string schedulingPolicyId;
        @invocableVariable(required=true)
        public string accountId;
        @invocableVariable(required=true)
        public datetime startDateTime;
    }

}

Example Code Test Method

@isTest
private class LXSchedulerFirstAvailableTest {
    static testMethod void getAppCandidatesTest() {
        String expectedResponse = '[' +
        '  {' +
        '    \"startTime\": \"2021-03-18T16:00:00.000+0000\",' +
        '    \"endTime\": \"2021-03-18T17:00:00.000+0000\",' +
        '    \"resources\": [' +
        '      \"0HnRM0000000Fxv0AE\"' +
        '    ],' +
        '    \"territoryId\": \"0HhRM0000000G8W0AU\"' +
        '  },' +
        '  {' +
        '    \"startTime\": \"2021-03-18T19:00:00.000+0000\",' +
        '    \"endTime\": \"2021-03-18T20:00:00.000+0000\",' +
        '    \"resources\": [' +
        '      \"0HnRM0000000Fxv0AE\"' +
        '    ],' +
        '    \"territoryId\": \"0HhRM0000000G8W0AU\"' +
        '  }' +
        ']';
        lxscheduler.SchedulerResources.setAppointmentCandidatesMock(expectedResponse); 
        Test.startTest();
            LXScheduleFirstAvailable.payloadIn pl = new LXScheduleFirstAvailable.payloadIn();
            pl.workTypeGroupId = '0VSB0000000LB9TOAW';
            pl.serviceTerritoryId ='0HhB0000000TrsdKAC';
            pl.startDateTime = datetime.now();
            pl.accountId = '001B000001KYUM3IAP';
            pl.schedulingPolicyId = '0VrB0000000Kz6Z';
            list<LXScheduleFirstAvailable.payloadIn> plList = new list<LXScheduleFirstAvailable.payloadIn>();
            plList.add(pl);
            List<event> candidateList = LXScheduleFirstAvailable.ScheduleIt(plList);
            System.assertEquals(1, candidateList.size(), 'Should return only 1 record!');
        Test.stopTest();
    }
}

Summary

This new Apex API is awesome and simplifies calling the Scheduler API for use cases where the user is already logged into Salesforce.

Additional Notes about this Example

In my example flow, I’m using 2 create record steps to create the Service Appointment and Assigned Resource. In production, you probably want to use the Scheduler flow component called Save Appointment. I’ve described how to use that component here. This component gives you added capabilities to ensure that the time slot selected is still available at the time of record save.