There are two applications associated with making appointments. The Appointment Book Manager is used for creating appointment books. A customer service representative then uses the Graphical Appointment Book application for scheduling or amending/removing appointments.

An appointment book is a calendar view of the time slots in a day when appointments can be made. The appointment book name you choose can be used for multiple work zones and you can duplicate the appointment book for another work zone. When a call is received by the customer services representative the work zone of the location is used to find the right appointment book manager record. A time zone should be applied for the territory covered by the appointment book, your customer service representative may be in a different time zone.

The appointment windows are slots in the day when appointments can be made, these must fit within the working time of the calendar and shift you choose. For each appointment window you specify the total number of appointments that can be made. Pattern Exceptions are used to specify periods when there is a change to the available appointments for a day and time window slot. For example, for the first 3 Saturdays in October there will be three technicians available for the two morning appointment windows. A history is kept of any changes you make to the appointment window and pattern exceptions.

You specify the job plans that could be performed when an appointment is made and how many appointments are needed to complete the job plan in case it requires more than one appointment. You will need to define the status at which work orders will be created when an appointment is made and whether the appointment slot is created as target dates or schedule dates on the work order. You can also say whether the customer services representative is allowed to assign the labor or crew or fix the scheduled start and end times.

After creating the appointment windows, you apply them to the calendar, and you can view the results in the View tab. From here you can adjust the number of appointments that could be made, for example, if one of the technicians normally assigned to appointments is sick and you want to reduce the number of available assignments for the following week. This can only be done if this will not conflict with existing appointments. There is an action for mass modifying the appointment book availability records across multiple days. Visibility is provided to the appointments that have been made as you need to be aware of these before making changes.

An action is provided to define the administrator access to an appointment book, this can be one or more persons or person groups.