Microsoft Teams Integration
- Blair Horne
- Kyle Simmons
- Joel Kearney
TimeTap offers a direct integration with Microsoft Teams*, which allows you and your team to take advantage of the two-way calendar sync as well as send Teams meeting links to your clients directly through TimeTap. In this documentation, we will cover:
*This integration is still in Beta. If you experience any issues or have feedback, please let us know by reaching out to support@timetap.com.
Syncing your Outlook 365 account to your TimeTap account
Each staff member who would like to accept meetings through Microsoft Teams must sync their accounts individually using the specific Outlook 365 sync that is designated for Teams. Start by logging into your TimeTap account, click your name in the upper right corner, and then click My Profile. From your profile, click Calendar Sync on the left menu, and then from the Calendar Sync page select the “Office 365 with Teams” option.
After clicking this option, Office 365 will guide you through the typical sign-in process, after which you will be returned to the Calendar Sync page. You will now see the Office 365 email address that you synced at the top of the page, but no specific calendars will be selected yet. To display your calendar, click “Add a calendar to sync with”.
Choose your email address from the dropdown menu labeled “Select Calendar From Account”. From this page, you can also determine the following:
Uploading - select this box if you wish to upload (sync) appointments from TimeTap to Office 365
Reasons Uploaded - if you opt to upload, select the reasons (services, classes, and courses) that you wish to sync to your Office 365 calendar here
Uploaded Event Title - for the uploaded appointments, this field captures the information that should be listed in the title (you can use email tags here if helpful). If nothing is entered, the default title will be put in place, which includes the client name, phone number, and reason type
Uploaded Event Location - this field captures the information that will appear in uploaded appointments event details for “location”. If nothing is entered, the default information will be put in place, which will show as the name of the location booked in TimeTap
Uploaded Event Description - this field captures the information that shows the details of the event when opened from Office 365. If nothing is entered, the default information will be in place, which includes the client’s details and any custom custom fields created for the account
Downloading - select this option if you want to sync the appointments from your Office 365 calendar to your TimeTap calendar. Selecting this option will ensure that if an event is on the Office 365 calendar and marked as “busy”, your availability in TimeTap will be updated so that no one can book you during this time
Downloading details - select this option to allow TimeTap to retrieve the event name and description of the events in your Office 365 calendar. If there are classified or sensitive events on your Office 365 calendar, TimeTap can either show or hide the details depending on the selection made in this field. If you opt not to download details, the event can still be synced to the TimeTap calendar, but no details will show
Once all necessary changes have been made, click the green button labeled “Save New Sync Details” at the bottom of the box.
After this, you should begin to see all appointments begin to sync. The process could take up to about 10-15 minutes, depending on how many appointments need to be synced both ways.
Adding a Microsoft Teams virtual location
If you would like to accept or create appointments that will simultaneously set up a Microsoft Teams link to the space where the appointment will take place, you can do that by creating a Microsoft Teams specific location in TimeTap. All appointments booked through TimeTap at this location will create a Teams event link, and that information will be sent to TimeTap. First, you’ll need to create a virtual location. If you already have a virtual location, you may use that, just note that you may need to implement some additional features and messaging templates if you intend to accept virtual appointments using more than one method (like Zoom, Chime, etc.).
Once you have a virtual location set up, go to that Location’s profile by going to Settings > Locations > View (next to the virtual location). From the Location Profile, click Edit in the top right corner and choose Microsoft Teams from the dropdown menu labeled “Virtual Location Type”.
Click Save in the upper right corner, and the Location will be all set to begin creating Teams event links when appointments are booked for it.
Updating Appointment Templates to Include the Teams meeting link
The last step to ensure that clients receive the appropriate meeting information is to update your Appointment Templates. You may want to add this information to several different templates, as it can be helpful for clients to receive the information in the confirmation email as well as in any reminder emails and texts that are sent. The important thing to note is that anywhere you want this appointment-specific Teams meeting link to appear, you can use this tag: %APPT_VIRTUAL_ROOM_URL%. This tag populates a URL for the Teams meeting that is unique to that appointment. In this guide, we’ll outline the steps for adding this to the most common appointment template, New Appointment by Client.
First, click Messaging > Appointment Templates > View (next to the template you want to edit). From this page, you’ll see all of the templates in this category. In this account, there is a specific template just for virtual meetings that is different from the other templates (if you only have virtual meetings, you could apply this information directly to your default template). Click View next to the template you want to edit.
From the Template profile, scroll to the Body section and click Edit. In edit mode, you’ll be able to paste the appropriate tag - %APPT_VIRTUAL_ROOM_URL% - into the message. This will populate the unique meeting link when the email gets sent to clients. If you want the URL to be a live hyperlink, you can click the link icon in the edit toolbar.
From here, you’ll be prompted to enter some information in order to insert the link.
URL - in this field, you can add the tag %APPT_VIRTUAL_ROOM_URL%. Even though it isn’t a URL now, it will become one when the email is sent.
Text to Display - by default, this field will be populated by the information entered in the URL field. You can leave it as is or enter something the client will read to indicate what the link is.
Title - this field is optional, and any text entered here will appear when a mouse hovers over the link.
Target - choose New Page or Same Page, depending on whether you want the link to open in a new page/tab or in the current webpage.
Click OK, and your link is all set in the template.
Before moving on, it’s a good idea to add any additional verbiage to the template to help point the user to the Teams Link. Once your template is completely edited to include the new tag, click Save.
After completing all of the above steps, from syncing to setting up the location and template, we recommend booking a test appointment just to make sure it’s working as expected. To do this, you’ll just need to create an appointment for a staff member who has set up the Office 365 with Teams sync at the Virtual Location. You should see this appointment sync to the Office calendar, complete with the Teams link.
Known Limitations with the Teams Integration
While in its beta testing phase, the Team integration is currently only able to generate meeting links for service-based appointments.
When the Teams integration is used with classes or courses, individual meeting links will still be generated for each individual client’s appointments instead of one link being generated for the whole session.
Because of this current limitation, we do not recommend using the Team integration if your account uses classes or courses while this integration is still in beta. This behavior will be resolved once this integration is fully released in its final form.