SSC Campus - Case Management: Appointment Scheduling

Appointment Scheduling
Users with appropriate permissions can schedule appointments by checking the box beside student names in various lists throughout the application and by clicking on Schedule Appointment option in the Action Menu.  These lists are typically found on your home-page and in Search areas of the application. The system will then display the Schedule an Appointment page.

Appointment Components

• Type: What determines whether the appointment you are creating is an Advising, Tutor, or General Event appointment. While both Advisor and Tutor appointments are fairly self-explanatory, a General Appointment may not be. A General Event appointment can be considered an obligatory event for the student. Events that may qualify are things such as Football practice, Honors Society Lunch, etc. The reason for adding these types of events to a student's calendar is important because those events will then show up as Conflicts when scheduling future appointments (more on Conflicts shortly). It is usually a best practice to only include those General events when they occur during the regular school day, or office hours. 

• Reasons: Where you will select what the purpose of the appointment is. For example, Career Counseling and Graduation Audit can be valid reasons for advising appointments. For Advising and Tutoring appointments, reasons are configured by your Application Administrators. For general events, the reasons field is left open.

• Comments: A section where extra commentary can be entered about the appointment. These comments are seen by both the student(s) and the advisor when they look at their calendar and receive their appointment notification email.

• Location: Where you will meet your students.  Select the correct location from the drop down list.

• Course: Will allow you to schedule a tutoring appointment based on a course rather than a tutoring service. Simply click in this field to pull up a menu and type in the course that you would like to schedule under to narrow the menu down.

• Select a Date: Prompts users to select a week in which you would like to schedule the appointment. This allows users to see the entire week, and not just a single day, to determine which is the best day to schedule an appointment.

• Reminders: Are sent the day of the appointment.The email reminder is sent the morning of the appointment and the text message reminder is set x number of minutes before the appointment. X number of minutes is actually defined on the Admin tab by your Application Administrator. You can mouse over the ? mark beside the text reminder to see what the current value of X is.

• Add an Attendee: Allows you to add extra users without having to exit the schedule appointment page. Simply type in the user's name, select them, and they will be added to the appointment.

• People Attending: The users who will by scheduled for this appointment. The user scheduling the appointment is able to Remove or Add an Attendee prior to saving the appointment.

• Select an Advisor or Tutor: Will display the list of tutors who have availability at the selected location. If you are creating an appointment for yourself, simply check your name.  However, showing all tutors gives users the ability to create appointments for any tutor at that location (this option can be turned off to where tutors are only able to create appointments for themselves.  See your Application Administrator for more information).

• Length: Refers to the length of the appointment. While it will default to whatever the tutor has set up in their availability, it can be overridden here.

• The Scheduling Grid: Where you will actually select what time the appointment will take place. You will notice that a checkbox will appear for any times that are available for scheduling. If something is already scheduled or Conflicts with that time, you will see that notated on the grid. For example,  you will be able to see Appointments, Free Busy, Conflicts (such as a student's class), or in some cases, Drop-in's for walk-in appointment times. A blank means the selected tutor does not have availability for that time on that day. You can click on the word Conflicts or Appointments to see who has a scheduling conflict.

• Availabilities: Where you can override preset availabilities and schedule the appointment at any time at any day. Select the option Ignore Availabilities, unlock the calendar and you will see check-boxes appear in every field in the grid. Selecting this option allows you to override any conflict or non-available day to schedule the appointment exactly where and when you want it.

• Repeat This Appointment: Where you can make this appointment reoccurring. While there are many options to choose, the most common and easiest option to use is Weekly. Select Which Days, how often it should recur, and Repeat Until to make this appointment repeat.