Availability Information

Availability information enables On-Call Optimizer to assign on-call shifts around the existing commitments in the life of each team member.

Availability information is imported from the calendars that have been connected to your account and configured for import.

Each piece of availability information consists of the following attributes:

• The member to whom it relates.
• The start time.
• The end time.
• An action (prefer, or block).
• Descriptive details (title & summary).

Availability blocks

Block actions prevent On-Call Optimizer from assigning any shifts to the named member between the start and end times.

Blocks are created for any holiday or out of office event types and can also be triggered using one of the following strings in the title or description of an event:

• not oncall
• no oncall
• not-oncall
• no-oncall
• noc

Availability preferences

Prefer actions allow members to hint to On-Call Optimizer that they would prefer to be assigned shifts between the start and end times.

Preferences must be manually triggered using one of the following strings in the title or description of an event:

• prefer oncall
• prefer-oncall

Event ownership and acceptance

Only events that are either organized or explicitly accepted by you are processed as sources of availability information.

Events created by other users which appear on a calendar (e.g. because you have been invited to participate in the event), will be ignored by On-Call Optimizer until you accept the event on the calendar. This check is in place to prevent any user with the permissions to place invited events on your calendar from being able to create availability information for you.

These rules are also applied if you configure a team or shared calendar which you have access to as a source of availabilty information in your On-Call Optimizer account. Only those events on the shared calendar which you have directly organized, or explicitly accepted will be imported as availability information for you in On-Call Optimizer.

Availability Lifecycle

New availability information is imported to On-Call Optimizer from configured calendars on a regular basis to cover the time period from the present time until 90 days in the future. Any previously imported availability information that has been removed or updated in the source calendar will also be removed or updated as necessary in On-Call Optimizer.

Availability information will expire and be removed from On-Call Optimizer once the end time of the event is in the past, however any such information that was used for assignment of shifts will remain available in the history attached to the assignment event record even after it has expired from On-Call Optimizer’s cache of upcoming availability information.

Removing availability information

Individual events in the future

To remove availability information for a future time from On-Call Optimizer, update or remove the calendar event that the information is sourced from (e.g. remove the associated holiday or out of office event, or update the event title or description to remove any no-oncall or similar tags).

On-Call Optimizer will detect the changes on the next refresh, or you can trigger an immediate refresh on the main Calendars page.

All future events sourced from a specific calendar

To remove all upcoming availability events sources from a specific calendar, disable the retain availability configuration setting and then deselect, or disconnect the calendar from On-Call Optimizer.

Future events retained from a previously disconnected or deslected calendar

Retained entries for calendars which are no longer connected to On-Call Optimizer can be manually removed by clicking the red cross to the right of the entry.

More Information

For further details on how availability information is used in shift assignment, refer to the algorithm details documentation.