Help with advising: Free, appointment scheduling tools on the Internet

Tired of lots of back and forth emails with students about when you can meet with them for advising?  

Grumpy about formatting that advising schedule for your door?  

Frustrated when the advising schedule falling off of your door and needing to re-tape it to your door?

Are you ruining your nails by peeling tape off of your door when you are done with advising season?  

Well, the Internet has some free solutions to these bane-of-our-existence problems during the advising season.  There are a number of free, online appointment scheduling tools. 

In a fit of enthusiasm, I checked some out today (some might call that a fit of procrastination). I started by googling "free online appointment tools" and found an article highlighting 7 of them - most of the substantive text describing these 7 are from that article (which listed, but did not review them).

Here are my thoughts from my own experience messing around with these tools:

Highly recommended:

SuperSaaS (click here to link to the website)

• Online booking
• E-mail integration (sends reminders to you, your advisees via email or text)
  
• Website integration (you can add it to your website - I didn't do this)
  

The free SuperSaaS plan includes a maximum of 50 registered users and has advertisements.  I found it the most intuitive to use of the 7 I checked out - and so far, my students like it.  It took about 40 minutes to set up adding in slots when I am free, when I am not, but I will have my info in there for future semesters, so I am happy with that.  I sent students a link to the password-protected website today at 7 a.m. and when I just checked, 15 of my 23 advisees have already scheduled themselves - I think that is worth 40 minutes of setup.  You can also integrate this schedule with your comptuer's schedule, if you use outlook (that is where Salem State is heading, right?).

I also really liked Acuity Scheduling and GenBook - but would have had to pay $8 to block out times I was not free, so blew that off:

Acuity Scheduling

• Online booking
• Website integration
• Customization
• Unlimited clients
• Unlimited appointments

Acuity Scheduling offers a free single user version, but it does not include a personalized booking site or the ability to accept credit cards.

 Genbook

• Online booking
• Book Now website button
• Personalized website
• Unlimited staff members
• Unlimited services

Genbook Free limits future scheduling to four weeks. Their paid versions were mentioned in my previous post.


Confusing to me, but may work for you:

 AppointmentPlugIn

• Online booking
• Customization options available
• E-mail confirmations
• Website integration

This tool provides a limited free version that has a limit of 20 appointments per day and advertising in the e-mail confirmations.

 CreateAppointments

• Online booking
• E-mail confirmations
• Create customer accounts

The free basic version of CreateAppointments has an ad on the bottom of the online scheduler and does not include customization.

 MEMOTXT Scheduler

• Free downloadable software
• Search functionality
• Retains client contact information
• Sends out SMS text message appointment reminders

MEMOTXT currently works with all Microsoft platforms, but a Linux and Mac version are in the works.
 Pimero Free Edition

• Free downloadable software
• Includes appointments, task list planner and contact manager
• Synchronizes multiple PCs
• Secure and automatically encrypts stored data
• Outlook import

The Pimero Free Edition is a feature-heavy downloadable option for standardizing your scheduling process.

 Have fun getting organized - and good luck with advising this year!