How Calendar Permissions Prevent Double Bookings for a Wellness Centre

Helping hands and calendar personas with Teamup Calendar

With various needs and use cases, this wellness centre found a way to use calendar permissions as personas for quick and easy calendar use.

About Helping Hand Services

At our wellness centre, my colleagues and I share space in two different buildings for various activities and needs. There is a daycare running out of one of the buildings, on the weekdays.

Some of us have a fairly long drive into our space. Needless to say, having confusion over the schedule or a double-booking wasted a lot of time and money for all of us.

The challenge

Working in a group of diverse colleagues, with varying schedules and priorities, had caused some issues in the past. Sometimes people were confused about what space was available to them at a particular time. Teamup solved that problem quickly! However, the concept of giving different access permissions via unique calendar links still caused confusion once in a while.

Teamup has been a lifesaver for our team.

We have very different uses for room sharing: a myofunctional therapist, a parent counsellor, an occupation therapist, etc; a daycare during the business week; and workshops and meetings during the weekend. All of these uses and activities run at irregular times in both our buildings.

People need to see what’s going on in the other spaces, but with varying levels of permissions. These different permission levels are set for different use cases, rather than per person.

Since we set permission levels for known use cases, rather than for individuals, people had access to multiple calendar links for different purposes. This allowed all of us to use the calendar as needed in different scenarios, but also created confusion: people would get confused about which calendar link to use for different purposes.

The solution

In order to make the various permissions easy to understand and use, we came up with the idea of creating different ‘personas’ for each permission level. We based the personas on two things: 1) the particular space they were booking, and 2) how much ‘power’ each persona had to book and view the bookings.

What we love about Teamup is that there are so many ways to arrange, name, or set access permissions for the sub-calendars.

These personas are different pretend ‘people’ that we created to differentiate the many use cases. Rather than labelling the calendar links by their access permission or by the name of a person, we label them as personas. The personas help our users to easily see which calendar link they need for different uses, and got rid of the small amount of confusion we were having.

To create our personas, we used the analogy of business leaders and board members. These helped us create an easily recognizable system for our team. They “adopt” a persona that fits the booking(s) they need to manage and use the appropriate calendar link for that persona.

How it works for us

Here are several examples of how we use personas in our wellness center.

For our daycare space:

  • The daycare provider—who needed to be able to see who was using the space, and all the extra bookings—became a Daycare Boardperson Persona, with a Modify-from-same-link, no-details permission level. This persona needs to add or modify their own events, but only view the other reservations.
  • The occupational therapist—who uses the space on weekends and needs to book in two places, but not see everything—has access to two personas: a Daycare Requester Persona, with Add-only, no-details permission. This persona is not allowed to see what else is scheduled for the daycare space and can leave booking requests for approval to use the space. She also can access a Counselling Room Chairperson Persona, for bookings in the shared counselling room (see below for more details).

For a counselling room, mostly used by one person:

  • The therapist in charge of that room has access to the Counselling Room COO Persona, with Modify permissions.
  • Other therapists can access the Counselling Room Secretary Persona, with Add-only permission. This persona is allowed to see when other therapists are in, but only request to share the room, and cannot change the bookings after they have been made.

For a counselling room shared equally by several counsellors:

  • Each counsellor has access to a Counselling Chairperson Persona calendar link, with a Modify-from-same-link permission level. This persona has the ability to add or modify their own events, and is allowed to see the bookings of other counsellors sharing the space.

What we love about Teamup is that there are so many ways to arrange, name, or set access permissions for the sub-calendars. Taking a moment to figure out the model for your permissions, and how they work for each person or room or building, gives both the flexibility and power needed to make bookings easy. In the end, it keeps everything simple for users. For us, these personas have helped us completely alleviate our ‘who’s who’ of different links and kept all our sub-calendars clean and up to date.


Thanks to Maria Andrusiak at Helping Hand Services for sharing your story.

Header photo by Perry Grone on Unsplash.

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