Here is a great example of where CoachAccountable’s coaching software gets better through me being exposed to a style of doing things other than my own.

The calendar feed of appointments is a lovely thing, allowing both coaches and clients to have appointments [set within CoachAccountable] appear right within their usual calendars (like Google Calendars, iCal, and Outlook).

Beyond the what and when, calendar software aficionados know that it’s handy to have location and descriptive information about a calendar event right there as well.

For my sake when it comes to coaching appointments there’s nothing to it: “where” is invariably on the phone, and there are no access or dial-in details to speak of, or really anything else–I call them and that’s that.

But last Thursday I had a great call with Liz Heiman of Percio Strategies.  We went over a bevy of great questions of how to set up and do this or that within our coaching tool, and Liz made a great case for how useful it would be to have location and description information about an appointment appear right along side appointments within people’s calendars: vital for coordination of meeting locations and a great boon to timely attendance to have dial in information right there for attendees.

I.e. CoachAccountable really should have location and description information settable for appointments, and that information should appear right in people’s calendars.

I was sold.  I spent the afternoon adding this to CoachAccountable.  Let’s see how this works!

Adding location and/or descriptive information to your CoachAccountable Appointments starts with your setup of Appointment Types.

When adding or editing any Appointment Type, scroll down and you’ll see a new line toward the bottom, “Extra:”, with a link to click:

Give it a click and you’ll be presented with places to type in your extra information:

Once setup for a given Appointment Type, you’ll have this information pre-filled in for any appointments you schedule of this type.  If you’d like to modify this information (or even just give it a peek) you can by clicking the “Modify location/description information…” link when scheduling:

This is nice if, say, the dial-in information varies sometimes, or you want to add a little note for your clients to see in their calendars:

Once this is set, where can this be seen by coach and client?

First off it’s visible to both parties within CoachAccountable in the widget listing of upcoming appointments.  Simply click on the Calendar icon for an appointment that has either or both a location and description set, and it will appear:

But the real fun of this is having this information appear right in your calendar system of choice, provided you’ve done the one-time setup to make your CoachAccountable appointments appear there.  Here’s how that appointment shows up when viewed in Google Calendar:

And there you have it!  You can put key location and descriptive information in your appointment types if it’s standard and consistent, customize it when scheduling specific appointments in case it’s not, and ultimately have this information appear right in yours and your client’s calendars automatically.

My thanks again to Liz for her insightful glimpse into the world of relying upon calendar scheduling and integration for more than just the what and when, CoachAccountable is better for its expanded support of calendar integration!

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