Availability, where the schedule actually lives
Dispatchers shouldn't have to leave the schedule to find out who's working. We moved team availability into the dispatch board itself so coverage decisions happen in one place.
Every dispatcher we've watched does the same thing: opens the schedule, then opens a second tab, a spreadsheet, or a group chat to figure out who's actually available. The schedule tells them where the jobs are. Something else tells them who can do them. The gap between those two answers is where double-bookings and missed coverage live.
That gap is what this release closes.
Coverage belongs next to the calendar
We added an Availability panel directly inside the Schedule dispatch board, alongside the weekly view Manage Team Availability. The weekly view was the obvious anchor — it's the zoom level where coverage questions actually get asked. "Who can take the Thursday afternoon install?" is a week-shaped question, not a day-shaped one. Putting availability one click away from that view means the answer is in the same field of vision as the gap you're trying to fill.
The panel slides in over the board rather than replacing it, so you keep the schedule grid visible while you set or review who's on. That sounds small. In practice it's the difference between assigning a job with confidence and assigning a job, switching screens to double-check, switching back, and hoping nothing changed.
Set and review in the same place
The panel handles both sides of the workflow: setting availability for the week ahead and reviewing it when you're staffing jobs Manage Team Availability. We deliberately didn't split those into separate tools. The person planning next week's coverage and the person dispatching today's work are often the same person, fifteen minutes apart. Making them context-switch between two surfaces to do related things is exactly the kind of friction that pushes teams back to spreadsheets.
If you're a larger shop where those roles are split, the shared surface still helps — the dispatcher sees the same availability the scheduler set, with no export step in between.
What's next
This is the foundation, not the finish line. Now that availability lives on the board, the natural next steps are surfacing conflicts at assignment time and letting techs propose their own availability for review. We'd rather ship the shared surface first and build those on top of it than bolt them onto a workflow that still requires three tabs. If you manage a team on the Schedule board, open the weekly view and give the Availability panel a try — and tell us what's missing.