Salesforce does not support adding multiple participants to a private appointment. Therefore, you can not create a private appointment with multiple participants on the SUMO or Salesforce Calendar.   There are several workarounds to achieve this outlined below.

What is a private appointment?

Sometimes you need to create a private appointment whereby no one else, except those invited, can see the details.  In the case of “Private” appointments, typically, those that are not invited will just see an appointment on your calendar that says “BUSY”.  Perhaps it is an internal management meeting (multiple participants) or a doctor’s appointment (single participant).

SOLUTION 1: Use Google Calendar or Outlook

Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook both support creating “Private Appointments” with multiple participants.  Therefore, if you are syncing your Outlook or Google Calendar with Salesforce/SUMO, then you should create the private appointment on either Outlook or Google Calendar, add multiple participants, and sync this with Salesforce/SUMO.  At this point, Salesforce/SUMO will create 1 single private appointment for each participant in Salesforce/SUMO.  Only the participants will be able to see the details and everyone else in Salesforce/SUMO will just see that the participants are busy.

SOLUTION 2: Create Single Appointments

If you do not use Google Calendar or Outlook and prefer to schedule a private appointment with multiple participants on the SUMO or Salesforce Calendar, you will have to create 1 single private appointment for each participant.   We realize this is not ideal, but it is a limitation of the salesforce platform, and therefore recommended to achieve this via Google Calendar or Outlook.

Should I worry about this limitation?

SUMO Scheduler customers consider this a very rare use case and the above an acceptable solution for the following reasons:

  • Most commonly a user creates a private appointment for 2 reasons: a) a confidential (private) internal meeting or b) a confidential personal meeting (doctors appt).
    • Confidential Internal Meeting: Typically, these meetings are created on the company calendar of choice (Google Calendar or Outlook) and others are invited, which is supported in Solution 1 above.
    • Confidential Personal Meeting: Typically, these meetings are also created on the company calendar of choice (Google Calendar or Outlook), which is supported in Solution 1, but also in Solution 2 above.
  • Schedulers use the SUMO Calendar to achieve more advanced scheduling of appointments for providers and rarely schedule private appointments with multiple participants for the providers.