At first blush, implementing scheduling functionality in your application or website looks like it would be the simplest thing in the world to pull off. After all, the actual process for using most scheduling solutions is pretty much as “point and click” as it gets – with new appointments and events scheduled in about 15 seconds or less.
Common Scheduling API Roadblocks Developers Need to Overcome
Beneath the surface of that super user-friendly experience, however, is something far more complex.
So complex, in fact, that a lot of developers learn (relatively early on in the development process) that it makes a lot more sense to use scheduling API services to overcome common obstacles than trying to build something from scratch – reinventing the wheel along the way.
Below we highlight some of the biggest obstacles developers come across when working with scheduling systems and why it makes so much sense to lean on scheduling API services to shortcut development time and improve results.
Let’s take right in!
Incorporating Multiple Scheduling APIs
While almost all popular calendar platforms operate similarly as far as functionality is concerned, the code, API, and “hooks” running under the hood couldn’t be more unique.
Google, Outlook, Exchange, and the Office 365 calendar systems all have their own unique API that makes integration possible. But integrating all of those APIs together with outside APIs as well can become a real spaghetti situation in a hurry.
Everything starts to “tangle” pretty quickly and before you know it it’s almost impossible to keep your scheduling solution tight, organized, and well optimized.
By using API scheduling services that act as a single point of contact for multiple calendar APIs, however, you’re able to smooth things out and streamline your app or service significantly.
Scheduling Across Multiple Calendars
If you combine the unique complexity of multiple calendar applications with the fact that they treat event/appointment creation directives as second-class objects it’s not hard to see how things can spiral out of control when you have unified scheduling across multiple calendars.
By using a single API service to manage all second-class objects (even transforming them into first-class objects) across multiple calendar platforms everything smooths out significantly.
Less resources are used, event creation requests are handled much faster, and at the end of the day managing events across multiple different calendar platforms becomes almost effortless.
Scheduling Across Multiple Timezones
Dealing with scheduling across multiple time zones is one of those things that often goes overlooked by new developers working with calendar and scheduling APIs for the first time – at least until everything breaks under real-world testing, anyway!
Any applications that are going to be responsible for managing events that span across multiple regions and multiple time zones need to be engineered to “normalize” time.
With scheduling API services, time isn’t just normalized on the user end of things – always displaying the right time for each user depending on their specific time zone while keeping things synchronized. But they also make it easy to manage, update, and instance the timing of events across multiple time zones on the backend, too.
Synchronized Scheduling with Multi-User Availabilities
One of the core functionalities that a scheduling solution needs to include is the ability to find schedule availability across multiple users, allowing end-users to schedule appointments and events in “open space” shared by everyone using that calendar specifically.
Standard calendar API solutions take advantage of “free/busy resources” to handle this on their own. And while that does a solid job for single users on one calendar application, things break down pretty quickly when you’re trying to manage multiple calendars and multiple users at once – all with their own unique schedules.
Top-of-the-line scheduling API services eliminate this obstacle by synchronizing schedules in real time across multiple user and multiple calendar instances. This keeps everyone on the exact same page with limited potential for overbooking or mismatched schedules to pop up later down the line.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, scheduling API services shortcut development time significantly, overcome the obstacles highlighted above (and more) and should be leveraged at every opportunity rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and building this functionality from scratch.
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