We have changed TimeZest's logic when scheduling appointments using shareable URLs, and the following conditions are met:

When these conditions are met, TimeZest will create a contact in ConnectWise Manage, which it was doing before. This change was made to avoid the issue of unneeded contacts being created in Manage when appointments for non-Manage users are being scheduled by TimeZest.

We fixed a validation error where TimeZest was not correctly comparing minimum notice and scheduling window times when saving an appointment type, and thus was preventing saving of edits for the "scheduling options" section.

TimeZest ensures that the scheduling window is longer than the minimum notice period to avoid situations where it there would be no available period to schedule in.

We've modified the way that minimum notice and scheduling window periods are specified to make them more intuitive.

The new control has two additional unit options which take into account business hours when TimeZest is calculating when to offer appointments.

The minutes, hours and days options work as before, and are simply "wall-clock" durations that don't look at business hours / availability for the resource being scheduled at all.

The "business hours" option counts that number of hours into the future, but only counts hours within the specified availability for the resource. For an example, assume a resource is scheduled to work 9am to 5pm, and the minimum notice setting is set at "6 business hours", and a end user schedules at 3pm. TimeZest will count 6 hours forward during the availability, so 2 hours today, and 4 hours tomorrow, meaning the earliest possible appointment it can offer will be 1pm tomorrow.

The "business days" option counts business days (including the current business day if the user is scheduling during business hours). So if this is set to "1 business day", then if the end user is scheduling during business hours today, the first appointment will be offered at the start of business tomorrow. However, if the user is scheduling outside business hours, the first appointment will be offered at the start of the business day after that. This setting takes into account any configured holidays in ConnectWise Manage or Autotask, but not Office 365 where holidays can only be specified as ordinary appointments.

When a TimeZest user has Office 365 configured as their "writable" calendar, TimeZest no longer include an ICS file on the confirmation email sent to them, even if this is configured for the appointment type.

This was done because Outlook (and other email clients) automatically add the ICS file as a tentative appointment, which was a duplicate with the appointment that TimeZest had already created via API.

As notified late last year, the No-Response deadline, which controls how long TimeZest waits before moving a ticket into the configured "No Response" status was changing from being a global option to a per-appointment type option on January 31. This changeover has now happened.

Previously, the "Send Technician Email" setting which controlled whether TimeZest sent a confirmation email to the scheduled technician (and whether it included an attached .ics invitation) was a global setting, found in the "Email Settings" page.

We've now moved this to the appointment type page in preparation for some future changes to TimeZest, and this means you can now have different settings for each appointment type if you wish. Your existing global setting has been transferred to the appointment types, so if you do nothing, everything will operate precisely as before.

With the recent changes to how TimeZest handles users (done to support the new O365 integration), the functionality to delete a user, rather than simply deactivate them, was inadvertently removed.

This has now been restored, and it is possible once again to delete a user from TimeZest.

We've updated the retrieval logic for the list of contacts TimeZest shows for the "Schedule appointment with a different contact" option in the TimeZest pod/insight. Now inactive contacts are no longer included in the list.

TimeZest now stores the first and last names of clients separately, and these can now be individually included in email templates.

We've updated all built-in templates to use "Hi {{ appointment.client_first_name }}" as the salutation. Any custom templates will need to be manually updated.

We've moved reminders so that they now can be configured on a per-appointment-type basis, allowing you to use different reminder settings for more or less urgent appointment types.

All existing settings have been copied across, so there will be no change in behavior unless and until you make changes to your reminder settings.