Overview

With the highly anticipated updates to SS&E Meeting Scheduler throughout 2024, users of Student Success & Engagement will enjoy a much enhanced experience with meeting management.

This page provides an introduction to these forthcoming improvements and the actions your institution will need to take in order to continue using scheduling meetings.

• If your institution is currently using the SS&E Meeting Scheduler, actions must be taken over this summer.
• If your institution is NOT currently using the SS&E Meeting Scheduler, NO actions are required.

Introduction to Meeting Scheduler Improvements

Highlights:

• Completely reworked scheduling wizard to guide student meeting scheduling

• Online modality

• Enhanced notification and staff availability settings

• Direct scheduling links for staff and service

• Advanced reporting

• Upgrades to Next kiosk and walk-in system

Detailed Core Product Changes

1. New booking wizard for student meeting scheduling

• Student booking process reduced to 3 screens: Intro, Main page, Confirmation
• Students directed to choose service or staff
• Easy application of further filters, including online modality
• Multiple days’ availability display all at once

Here are some design mockups to give a sense of what this new booking wizard will look like:

Example 1: Student begins the scheduling process by choosing a service or their advisor.

Example 2: On the main page, student may apply additional filters before selecting a time slot.

Example 3: Student can view the appointment details and answer a custom question before confirming.

2. Modality for in-person, online, and phone meetings

Administrators can easily enable online and phone meeting types, in addition to in-person meeting modality, within SS&E Admin.

Once enabled, individual users will need to add their meeting modality(s) to each of their meeting availability windows.

• Meeting modalities indicate whether to generate slots for online, in-person, or phone meetings.
• Students can easily filter slots to select their desired meeting modality type.

3. Binding Length to Service

Admins will give each service a set length so that students are not selecting arbitrary and inconsistent meeting durations.

4. Enhanced User Settings and Usability Improvements

Enhanced Staff Settings will include:

• Out of office for auto reply and calendar blocking
• Date range for availability windows
• Online modality configuration
• Provide personal online meeting link
• Staff can access a link to their calendar, sending students directly into the meeting scheduler to book a meeting with them

Improved Admin Settings will include:

• Meeting length is bound to service type
• Creation of online and phone modality
• Configure meeting reminders
• Provide appropriate pre-appointment information
• Abandon meeting type
• Buffer time between meetings
• Faculty office location

5. Rename Meetings Administration ‘Location’ and ‘Service Delivery Location’

In the current design, most institutions have used location to represent a specific campus, and service delivery location to represent a specific campus office.

The 2024 Meeting Scheduler updates clarify these designations, allowing the student to confidently filter on the desired campus and office values.

• Admins can easily mark existing Campus/Office values as active/inactive or create new ones.
• Only active values will appear within the new Meeting Scheduler.

Location → Campus

• With the new design, institutions will need to check their locations to ensure that they make sense in the new Meeting Scheduler 'Campus' values.
• 'Campus' values will continue to import on the 'Locations' data feed, and this data feed name is remaining Location.

Service Delivery Location → Office

• In the current design, some institutions have added "online" into the Service Delivery Location field name to indicate the meeting modality to students.
• With the addition of meeting modalities, institutions should remove "online" from the field name since modality will be represented more effectively as its own entity.

What will we gain from the new Meeting Scheduler?

• The new Meeting Scheduler offers students a single point of entry to browse a variety of campus services and book a meeting with their advisor or an appropriate service/staff member.
• The new Meeting Scheduler can save institutions the additional cost of a third-party calendar vendor by introducing a new scheduling wizard, reminders, direct links to users' calendars, buffer time between meetings, and additional features.
• The new Meeting Scheduler informs with robust reporting on meeting traffic and its interaction with advisor meeting activity.
• The new Meeting Scheduler unifies the advisor experience within Watermark SS&E for core advising activities; facilitating direct student engagement with meetings, messaging, alerts, notes, campaigns, and tasks.
• The new Meeting Scheduler supports an enhanced and more unified record of student-advisor activity, allowing reference to meeting events.

Meeting Scheduler Update Project Timelines

Summer 2024 Meeting Scheduler Release Schedule

• All customers will be directed to the new Meeting Scheduler on July 12th, 2024 regardless of whether they have taken the required action steps.
• If your institution would like to go-live after June 14th, before July 12th, this can easily be done by enabling the feature flag which will direct student and advisors to the new scheduler.
• The new Watermark Student mobile app meeting scheduler experience will not be released until July 12th.

Required Actions 🚨

Campus calendar administrators, SS&E administrators, and staff advisors must all take action this summer in order to switch over to the new meeting scheduler experience.

• On July 12, the old meeting scheduler will be deprecated.
• Once administrators and advisors complete the required steps, they will appear in the new scheduler.
• After the Go-Live-Date on July 12th, if the steps outlined below are not taken, advisors will not generate open time slots for students to choose from.

In upcoming weeks, detailed instructions for each audience will be provided.

New Meeting Scheduler Calendar Integration

Campus calendar administrators will need to approve the new calendar integration, and detailed instructions will be provided in upcoming communications.

Microsoft institutions will employ the Graph API.

In addition, to allow much faster performance in the new Meeting Scheduler, individual staff users will be prompted to sync their calendars directly with Watermark.

Within each individual user's SS&E User Settings, there will be a new button that allows users' to "Sync Calendar" with Google or Microsoft. After logging in to their calendar with their institutional SSO, users will grant Watermark privileges that allow SS&E Meeting Scheduler to fetch availability windows directly from their calendar.

• Same as in the past, Watermark cannot read the content of users' existing meetings
• Watermark will continue to place events on a user's calendar through the existing service account
• Calendar events created in Watermark SS&E must be deleted or edited within SS&E