Connect your Outlook calendar

Connecting your Outlook calendar is optional. Nothing about booking requires it, and a program where nobody connects works exactly as it did. What it changes is the double booking you cannot see: the department meeting that lives in Outlook and not in TRIOPilot.

If you have no Outlook Calendar card at the bottom of your Schedule page, this feature is not switched on for your TRIOPilot installation, and there is nothing for you to do.

What Connecting Does

Three things, and only these three.

• Your Outlook meetings count as busy time here. Students are not offered a time you already have a meeting in, and neither are staff booking on your behalf.
• Every appointment booked with you appears on your Outlook calendar, with the student invited, so your own calendar shows your whole day whichever one you happen to be looking at.
• Online appointments can carry a Teams link, for the formats your admin chose. Your admin sets which ones on the Booking Rules card in Settings.

Your Outlook time counts as busy when it is marked Busy, Tentative, or Out of office. Something marked Free or Working elsewhere does not block anything, so a placeholder you keep marked Free stays bookable. Meetings you have cancelled are ignored, and only the calendar Outlook treats as your main one is read.

Connect Your Calendar

1. Open Schedule from your sidebar and scroll to the Outlook Calendar card at the bottom.
2. Choose Connect Outlook. You are taken to Microsoft to sign in.
3. Sign in with your college Microsoft 365 account. Personal Microsoft accounts are not supported, and if you use one the connection stops with a message saying so. Microsoft asks which account you want to use even when you are already signed in to one, so read that screen rather than clicking through it.
4. Approve the permissions. There are three, and Microsoft words them its own way: stay signed in so the connection keeps working, read your basic profile, which is your name and email address, and read and write your calendars.
5. You land back on your Schedule page with a green message confirming it.

TRIOPilot asks for your own calendar and nothing else. It cannot read a colleague's mailbox, and it cannot read your mail at all.

If Microsoft says an administrator must approve this. Some colleges do not let staff approve apps for themselves. Nothing is wrong with your account. Ask your program admin for the IT approval link, which they have in Settings under Features, and pass it to your IT department. Once IT approves it, come back and connect as above. See Set up appointment scheduling.

What You See On Your Week

Once you are connected, the calendar at the top of the Schedule page draws your Outlook meetings as grey bands labelled Outlook, alongside the time you blocked off yourself. They look the same as blocked time on purpose: nobody can be booked in either.

Two things worth knowing about those bands:

• They are yours alone. The whole program view an admin sees, under All advisors, does not draw anyone's Outlook meetings.
• TRIOPilot's own appointments are not drawn twice. The appointments it put on your Outlook calendar are recognised and left out, so your week does not fill up with duplicates of itself.

Now and then an amber note says your Outlook calendar could not be read this time, so its meetings are not drawn. Read that as a display problem, not an open calendar: booking still treats that whole stretch as busy, deliberately, because offering a time from a calendar we could not read is the worse mistake.

What the Student Receives

When an appointment is booked with you, TRIOPilot creates an event on your Outlook calendar and adds the student as an attendee, so Outlook sends them an invitation from your mailbox. Students without an email address on their record are simply not added.

The event is deliberately thin, because a calendar invitation travels further than a student record should:

• The title is the appointment type and the student's first name and last initial, such as "Financial Aid Support with Maria R.".
• The body carries your program's name, the format, the location or link where there is one, and a link back into TRIOPilot for the rest.
• Nothing else. No notes, no eligibility, no phone number, and never the student's full name.

It is set to show you as busy, with a reminder 15 minutes before.

Changes follow the appointment. Cancelling it in TRIOPilot removes the event from your Outlook calendar. Moving it removes the old event and creates a new one at the new time. Transferring it to a colleague takes it off your calendar and puts it on theirs, provided they have connected too.

The Outlook invitation is not the same thing as being told. TRIOPilot's own confirmation emails go to a student who books, moves, or cancels an appointment themselves. When staff make the change, TRIOPilot still sends the student nothing, and what Outlook does about an invitation is up to Outlook. So the rule in Change or cancel an appointment stands: tell the student yourself.

When It Needs Reconnecting

A connection can end without you doing anything. A changed password, a long stretch without using it, or a sign-in policy at your college can all stop it, and Microsoft simply refuses the next time TRIOPilot asks.

You are told twice. A notification arrives in your bell saying your Outlook calendar needs reconnecting, and the card on your Schedule page turns amber with a Reconnect Outlook button, along with the reason Microsoft gave.

While it is in that state:

• Bookings fall back to your published hours alone, so a student can be offered a time you have a meeting in.
• New appointments are not added to your Outlook calendar.
• Appointments already on your Outlook calendar stay exactly where they are.

Choose Reconnect Outlook and sign in again. Everything picks up from there.

Disconnect

Choose Disconnect on the same card and confirm.

• What stops: your Outlook meetings no longer count as busy time here, and new appointments are no longer added to your calendar.
• What stays: every event already on your Outlook calendar, invitations included. They are left alone on purpose, because deleting them would cancel real meetings a student was invited to.

Disconnecting removes TRIOPilot's stored connection to your calendar. If you also want to withdraw the permission on the Microsoft side, that lives in your own Microsoft account settings, under the apps you have given access to. Colleges present that page differently, so ask your IT department where yours is.

Things To Know

• Choose Any Time does not cross an Outlook meeting. Booking outside posted hours is allowed, because unpublished hours are just hours nobody got around to publishing. A meeting on your calendar is different, and the refusal says which one it hit. See Change or cancel an appointment.
• Deleting the event in Outlook does not cancel the appointment. The appointment is still on the books here, and the student still expects it. Cancel it in TRIOPilot, which is also what frees the time. The same goes for dragging a TRIOPilot event to a new time in Outlook: TRIOPilot does not read that back.
• The connection is yours, not your program's. If you work across two programs, one connection covers you in both, which is right: you cannot be in two places at once.
• Your admin can see who has connected, on the Outlook Calendar card in Settings under Features, along with anyone whose connection needs reconnecting. They cannot connect or disconnect on your behalf.