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Overview

Schedules determine who should be on-call for a given time period. At its core, a schedule consists of a group of users and rotation settings. This guide will walk you through the process of creating schedules, editing them, and understanding how the rotation settings work.

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Creating a schedule

  1. Enter the /keeper-schedule command anywhere in Slack.
  2. Name your schedule and select the users who should be in the rotation.
  3. Set the rotation settings, e.g., rotate shifts daily starting from today at 09:00.
  4. Preview your schedule and save it.
You can also create schedules from the Shiftkeeper home tab in Slack.
The schedule time zone is preselected based on your Slack profile time zone. If you would like to use a different one, simply pick another time zone from the dropdown.

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Rotation settings

Rotation settings determine how often and when schedule shifts rotate. You can choose to rotate shifts daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or on a custom interval, e.g., every 12 hours. The start date and time of the rotation determines when the first shift in the schedule starts. When setting up the rotation, you’ll a see a helpful hint that explicitly shows the shift handoff time and day.
If you set the rotation start in the past, the first shift will be truncated to start at the current time. The shift handoff time is still based on the specified rotation start time.
The order of the users in the list determines the order in which they’ll be on-call for the schedule. A user can appear multiple times in the rotation order. This is useful in cases where you need to distribute the shifts unevenly across users.

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Restriction intervals

By default, schedule shifts cover every day of the week. Restriction intervals allow you to restrict your schedule shifts to specific times, e.g., only business hours.
When creating a schedule in Slack, go to Additional settings to set up restriction intervals.

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On-call group size

You can adjust the on-call group size for a schedule, which is by default set to one. This enables you to have multiple responders on-call concurrently, without having to deal with multiple schedules.
When creating a schedule in Slack, go to Additional settings to change the on-call group size.

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Schedule preview

While creating a schedule, you can preview the shift calendar. This enables you to check whether the rotation and schedule settings are correct.

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Notifications

Shiftkeeper sends Slack notifications to the on-call users at the beginning of a shift. You can link Slack channels to schedules to receive notifications about shift and schedule changes. Shiftkeeper also enables you to attach Slack user groups to schedules. The member list of the user group is automatically updated to contain the users who are on-call for the schedule. This way you can easily mention your on-call teammates across Slack.

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Editing a schedule

  1. Go to the Shiftkeeper home tab.
  2. In the schedule list, click on the ... button and then Edit settings.
  3. Apply the changes and save.
Changes to the schedule rotation settings do not affect shifts which have already finished.
The schedule time zone cannot be changed after creation. We might remove this limitation in the future.

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Schedule examples

Here are a few practical examples of schedule configurations to help you get started.

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Weekly rotation with two concurrent on-call users

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Daily rotation restricted to business hours

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Custom rotation with a 12-hour interval