Connect Your Outlook Calendar

Connect your Outlook calendar so that meetings on it block bookings in TRIOPilot, and appointments booked in TRIOPilot appear in Outlook. Connecting is optional; booking works without it.

Advisors and admins can connect a calendar. Assistants, observers and guests cannot, so they do not see Connect Outlook. If you are an advisor or an admin and your Schedule page has no Outlook Calendar card at the bottom, the feature is not available to your program.

What Connecting Does

Connecting does three things:

• 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 while you are connected appears on your Outlook calendar, with the student invited when their record has an email address. Appointments booked before you connect are not added.
• Online appointments can carry a Teams link, for the formats your admin chose in Teams Meeting Links in Booking Rules (Settings, Features tab, Manage on the Scheduling row).

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 to use even when you are already signed in, so check the account before you continue.
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 to open the IT approval link in Outlook Calendar (Settings, Features tab, Manage on the Scheduling row) while signed in to TRIOPilot, with someone from your IT department who can approve apps for your college. The link opens Microsoft's approval page, where that person signs in and approves TRIOPilot. Once IT approves it, 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 gray bands labeled Outlook, alongside the time you blocked off yourself. They look the same as blocked time on purpose: nobody can be booked in either.

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 recognized and left out, so your week does not fill up with duplicates of itself.

Sometimes an amber note says your Outlook calendar could not be read, so its meetings are not drawn. Your time is not open: booking still treats that whole stretch as busy, so no one is booked over a meeting TRIOPilot could not see.

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. A student with no email address on their record is not added.

The event holds as little student information as possible, because a calendar invitation can be forwarded and shared:

• 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 their record has an email address and your program has not turned that email off. When staff make the change, TRIOPilot still sends the student nothing, and what Outlook does about an invitation is up to Outlook. So tell the student yourself. See Change or Cancel an Appointment.

When It Needs Reconnecting

A connection can end without you doing anything: a changed password, a long time without use or a sign-in policy at your college can stop it.

TRIOPilot tells you two ways. 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. From then on, your Outlook meetings count as busy time again and new appointments are added to your Outlook calendar. Nothing from the time it needed reconnecting is caught up, so fix these in Outlook yourself:

• An appointment booked with you or transferred to you in that time is not on your Outlook calendar.
• An appointment cancelled or transferred away in that time still has its event there.
• An appointment moved in that time still shows at its old time, and the new time is not there.

Disconnect

Choose Disconnect on the same card and confirm. If it does not go through, the confirmation stays open and says why.

• 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. Staff can book outside your posted hours, but not over a meeting on your Outlook calendar; the refusal says the time is taken by a meeting on your Outlook calendar. 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 in two programs, one connection covers you in both.
• Your admin can see who has connected, and whose connection needs reconnecting, in Outlook Calendar (Settings, Features tab, Manage on the Scheduling row). They cannot connect or disconnect on your behalf.