Integrate with Microsoft Outlook

Scheduling customer interviews can be tedious — finding a time for a conversation often means long email threads. Many teams already use Microsoft Outlook to manage their time. Connect your Outlook calendar to schedule interviews alongside existing meetings. It syncs your availability dynamically, offers flexible options to participants, and prevents scheduling conflicts so you can focus on customer insights.

• Prerequisites

• How it works

• Set up the integration

The Aha! Discovery integration with Microsoft Outlook is included in the Aha! Discovery Advanced plan.

Prerequisites

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How it works

The integration checks researchers’ Outlook calendars for busy times and removes those options from a study's scheduling page. It evaluates availability in real-time when a participant opens the scheduling page to choose a meeting time. Tentative and out-of-office events in Outlook count as unavailable.

The integration reads only busy status to determine availability. It does not access or store meeting content.

Each user sets up the integration in personal settings. After a researcher linked to a study configures it, their name appears in the Availability field in the Times section of the scheduling page. When selected, the integration excludes Busy times from that researcher’s Outlook calendar so participants cannot book those slots.

If you select more than one researcher in the Availability field for a scheduling page, the integration will look for busy times in both researchers' calendars. Participants will be offered time slots when at least one selected researchers is available.

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Set up the integration

Authenticate to Microsoft Outlook

Connect your Outlook calendar to Aha! Discovery using the steps below.

• In your Aha! Discovery account, navigate to User menu -> Settings -> Personal -> Meeting services -> Calendar sync.

• Next to Outlook, click Link account.

• Enter your Microsoft login and password when prompted and click Next.

• Click Accept on the Permissions requested prompt to give Aha! Discovery permission to access your Outlook calendar.

• Set access permission levels:

  • Select Read and write to allow the integration to both check your Outlook calendar for busy times and add new calendar events automatically when a participant schedules a meeting.

  • Select Read only if you only want to allow the integration to check your Outlook calendar for busy times. When you choose this option, calendar events will be sent to you via email and not created automatically.

Configure the scheduling page

Configure scheduling for your study so participants see accurate time slots. You will need contributor permissions to do this.

• Navigate to your study and click Scheduling.

• In the Weekly hours:

  • Use the dropdown menu next to Availability to select the researchers whose calendars the integration will read. All researchers linked to your study appear in the dropdown, but you can only select those who have set up the integration.

  • Configure Weekly hours for your scheduling page. This prevents the integration from booking time that appears open on an Google calendar but falls outside of researchers’ working hours.

• In the Meetings section:

  • Configure the Interview duration to tell the integration how long meetings it schedules should be.

  • Configure the Schedule to further refine researcher availability. The integration will look for busy times within the available times you set here and excludes times from the scheduling page when researchers are not available:

    • Weekly hours: This option will generate available meeting times based on the Weekly hours and researcher Availability you set in the Times section.

    • Custom: This option enables you to manually specify dates and times for each session. Click +Add to select a date and set the times you want to offer. Click Apply to save your changes. Click +Add again to add additional dates.

Learn more about creating a scheduling page in the the Aha! Discovery knowledge base.

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