Great to see the integrations (Stripe, Zoom, Google Meet, Google Calendar, Slack, Daily.co, and Microsoft Teams) [0].
In general, is there an "open" calendar-sync protocol? Would that be CalDAV (often paired with IMAP mail accounts in my experience)? (But then, would that typically require giving email credentials to the to-be-synced endpoint?)
One thing that sort of surprises me is that the appointment-scheduling apps seem to have such a practical dependency on Google, if one wants to facilitate syncing with arbitrary external calendars. I get that Calendly has tons of integrations, and Neeto has a useful selection, too. But say I want to sync with Fastmail, which does not have a specific integration with Calendly or Neeeto (but which does support CalDAV/IMAP). The answer is to to mutually sync through a Google Calendar. (I guess a generic "data workflow integrator"--Zapier, IFTTT, or custom code for APIs--might solve this, too, but only at the cost of some additional party and some additional complexity for a glue layer to set up and upon which to rely.)
- I love having a slick scheduling web page interface as a service. Cool. But why no "generic" sync (CalDAV/IMAP or something better I may not know about)? (It seems weird to not have a more direct-line scheduling approach--is it just me?)
- For example, I'd like to have no Google dependency, but use Calendly (or, Neeto, or another scheduling service). But even when I don't plan/need/want/intend to use Google, much less for scheduling, Google still finds its way into being the most convenient dependency! Wow!
This wasn't meant to be a rant, so, apologies if it reads that way. I get that building a SaaS, the first integrations will be the ones that >90% of the target probably uses. It's just slightly boggling to me, though, that there seems to be literally no open-tech solution in place. Since even the 500 lb gorillas seem to not have it, it's not just a matter of scale/time. Maybe just literally not enough people would use it, period, I guess. Or does one of the many competitors do this?
So-- what's going on? Why's calendar syncing kinda convoluted? (Some reading online tells a similar story for a big company's mail product requiring specific sync tools as of late; so I think the issue is not limited to purely-scheduling apps or smaller companies.)
Does this plight register with others? To me, if the product/service truly is a commodity, then that might imply having a corresponding "common" open/standard tech-integration component--no? I suspect something about security, or maybe lock-in, or market size, or maybe ruthless focus on schedule-making (new bookings on top of existing ones) over schedule-syncing, but I don't know enough about it. I would think this might be an area where one of the competitors might be able to stand out, for a niche within the niche.
I'd be happy to be schooled on this, if anyone's willing.
[0] https://www.neeto.com/neetocal/features/integrations