Nylas Virtual Calendars: Book Anything, Anytime, Anywhere

Nylas Virtual Calendars: Book Anything, Anytime, Anywhere

4 min read

    Allow your users to book anything, anytime, anywhere. With Nylas Virtual Calendars, your users can schedule meetings and manage resources without having to use their personal calendars.

    This protects their sensitive calendar data while giving them flexible, scalable scheduling options.

    Features include:

    • Security
      • Virtual Calendars offers your security-minded users the most secure scheduling workflow. By scheduling on a standalone calendar that doesn’t require them to connect to their Google, Exchange, Office 365, or Outlook calendars, users in industries like  finance, healthcare, or legal can now create calendars,  schedule events, and manage resources with peace of mind.
    • Velocity
      • Users no longer need to spin up new accounts with providers in order to book & manage a large fleet of resources (such as  cars, hotel rooms, gym classes, or anything  else).
    • Usability 
      • Users can book and manage anything, anytime, anywhere all within an elegant, streamlined workflow that exists fully within your application.

    Book Anything, Anytime, Anywhere

    Virtual Calendars have a variety of use cases across dozens of industries. We’ve included just a few examples below:

    • HR & Recruiting (ATS): Hiring managers and recruiters can schedule candidate interviews without using personal calendars. This protects sensitive or confidential calendar information by avoiding the need to use a private, provider-linked account.
    • Healthcare: Virtual Calendars allow customers such as Healthcare Marketplaces to connect to appointment data that sits in a siloed EHR/EPR system. As a result, patients can easily schedule healthcare appointments or medical evaluations that require multiple interactions such as exams, lab work, x-rays, etc. 
    • Automotive: Dealerships can schedule test-drives and services. Service managers can track and schedule assignments of shop equipment. Rental car companies can easily facilitate booking by creating a virtual calendar for each vehicle in their fleet.

    Bottom Line Benefits

    Virtual Calendars make it easy to add value to your application by unlocking new revenue streams and lowering operational overhead. By eliminating the need to connect with 3rd party provider accounts, Virtual Calendars reduce account registration costs and decrease the administrative burden of additional account and user management. Businesses can target new market segments that were previously inaccessible or cost-prohibitive to pursue.

    How Nylas Virtual Calendars Work

    Developers can leverage Virtual Calendars by using Nylas Native Auth to authenticate calendar accounts that use Nylas as the provider. Once the account has been created, you can create a new Virtual Calendar in a process that mimics creating secondary calendars for third-party calendar accounts:

    curl --location --request POST 'https://api.nylas.com/calendars' \
    --header 'Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN' \
    --data-raw '{
            "name":"Marie’s Radiation Services",
            "description":"Keep track of customer appointments",
            "location":"Warsaw, Poland",
            "timezone":"Warsaw/Poland"
    }'
    

     

    Running this command will create a calendar object that looks something like this:

    {
        "account_id": "dc41c2a1ce6840deba3cd41468fb75",
        "description": "Keep track of important customer appointments",
        "id": "ac1046f1dd1746d6a979b53c973c56",
        "is_primary": null,
        "location": "Warsaw, Poland",
        "name": "Marie's Radiation Services",
        "object": "calendar",
        "read_only": false,
        "timezone": "Europe/Warsaw"
    }
    

     

    With this in hand, you can now create and manage events on this calendar, just like any other calendar from a third party provider. To learn more about working with Virtual Calendars, head over to the docs.

    Summary

    With Nylas, you can create virtual calendars for your users as part of your subscription. Simply assign them a user account on the Nylas Platform and then create their virtual calendar. Now, you’re ready to support a whole new range of use cases.

    Learn how Nylas Virtual Calendars can help you provide full scheduling functionality without connecting to a third-party service provider. Speak to a platform specialist now.

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