Sessions and calendar

Sessions are the individual coaching or mentoring meetings that happen inside a program. A program admin configures how sessions work for their program — who can schedule them, what platform they meet on, how they’re prepared for, and how reminders go out — and the platform then handles booking, invites, and calendar sync for the people taking part.

What a session is

Every session records:

Who it’s for — the type of relationship involved, such as one-on-one coaching, one-on-one mentoring, a group session with a facilitator, a peer circle, a supervisor/manager session, or a reverse-mentoring session. (Some of these labels are set automatically based on how the program is configured, rather than always being picked from a list when scheduling.)
Why it’s happening — a separate classification for the session’s purpose in the program journey: a general session, an initial/intake meeting, a regular check-in, a goal-review session, a midpoint review, a closing/wrap-up session, a formal assessment, a feedback session, an urgent/crisis session, a shadowing session, or a training/workshop session.
When and how long — a scheduled date/time and a duration, with sessions generally allowed to run from 15 minutes up to 8 hours.
Where it happens — a location, which can be a virtual meeting (with a link), a physical location, a simple fixed-location description, or left undefined.
Its status — sessions move through a lifecycle: planned, pending approval, scheduled, completed, no-show, cancelled, disputed, or archived.

A session can also carry an agenda (prepared beforehand), notes (added afterward), and — depending on program settings — a request/approval workflow and a “propose an alternative time” negotiation between the two participants.

How sessions get scheduled

Programs can support two general scheduling patterns:

Self-booking — participants (typically the person receiving support) can request or schedule their own sessions directly.
Coach-initiated — the coach/mentor can initiate and schedule sessions.

Both can be turned on or off independently for a program, and an admin can also require that a match be finalized before any sessions are allowed to be scheduled. When self-booking is combined with an approval step, a requested session sits in a pending state until the other party approves it, declines it, or proposes a different time.

Admins also control the practical scheduling rules for a program:

How much advance notice is required before a session can be booked.
How far in advance a session can be booked.
The default and allowed session duration(s).
How close to the start time a session can still be rescheduled or cancelled.
Minimum and/or maximum number of days that should pass between consecutive sessions.
A target number of sessions per program, and (optionally) a hard maximum.
Which session types (coaching, mentoring, group, etc.) are available to choose from when scheduling.
Whether a session must use a pre-defined template, and whether an agenda is free-text, chosen from a curated list of topics, or both.

Meeting platforms: how a session actually gets a meeting link

When a session is scheduled, the platform needs to figure out whether — and how — to attach a video meeting to it. Programs choose from a small set of meeting-platform options (for example: no platform/calendar-only, a company’s own Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Sparkus’s own native video, or an externally supplied link), and the underlying idea is:

No platform selected — the invite is calendar-only: participants get a calendar hold with no meeting link attached.
A real meeting platform (Teams, Google Meet, Sparkus’s native video) — the platform automatically creates the actual meeting and embeds a working join link in the calendar invite.
An external link — the organizer pastes in their own meeting link (e.g. from a tool outside Sparkus), and that link is placed in the calendar invite body as-is.

Separately from which platform is used, a program can configure who is responsible for supplying the meeting link:

the system generates it automatically,
the coach/mentor provides their own preferred link,
the person being coached provides their own link,
either side can provide a link and the other side accepts it (“mutually agreed”), or
the session is in-person only, with no video link at all.

When a link is provided by a person (rather than generated automatically), the other participant can accept it or ask for a different one, and that negotiation is tracked so both sides know where things stand.

If a program doesn’t explicitly configure a platform for a given session, there’s a fallback order the platform tries automatically (for example, trying Teams, then Google Meet, then Sparkus’s native video) — though a program can also choose to skip this automatic fallback entirely and require an explicit selection instead.

Session preparation

Programs can optionally turn on a set of “session preparation” features so both sides show up ready:

A short briefing card and/or a role-specific prep checklist shown ahead of the meeting.
The option for participants to mark themselves “ready,” which can notify the other side.
A collaborative agenda that both participants can add to together before the session.
Curated, translatable agenda topics that participants pick from (with an option to also allow free-text topics).
Including relevant development goals in the pre-session briefing.
An optional email to the coach/mentor ahead of the session with the briefing details.

These are all opt-in — a program that doesn’t need this level of structure can leave them off and use the simpler agenda/notes fields.

Evaluation after sessions

A program can collect structured feedback after a session is completed. The person being coached fills out an evaluation with two parts: one section of feedback intended for their coach/mentor, and a separate section intended only for program administrators. Evaluations track completion progress and can require every relevant question to be answered before they’re considered complete.

Reminders

Programs configure reminder cadences independently for three different moments in a session’s life:

Reminders sent to organizers/participants at set points after a match is made, encouraging them to get a session on the calendar.
Reminders sent counting down to an upcoming session (e.g. a week before, a few days before, the day before).
Reminders sent after a session asking the participant to complete their evaluation.

Each cadence is just a list of time offsets, so admins can tune how many reminders go out and how far apart they are.

Calendar integration, at a glance

Calendar support works at two levels:

Program-level scheduling view — admins get a calendar view of a program showing upcoming sessions and other program events (grouped by cohort), so they can see everything scheduled at a glance and add general program events alongside sessions.
Personal calendar sync — participants can connect their own Microsoft or Google calendar so that Sparkus sessions appear on their personal calendar automatically, and (optionally) so the platform can be aware of their existing availability. Each person’s connection is independent, so one participant’s sync status doesn’t affect the other’s.

When a session is booked, rescheduled, or cancelled, the platform keeps the calendar invite in sync — updating the time or cancelling the invite as needed — so participants don’t have to manually manage it.

Time zones

Every program has an effective time zone, which cascades down from broader settings (tenant-level, then program-level) unless a more specific one is set. Session times are always stored consistently behind the scenes and displayed to each person in their own local time, so a coach and their coachee in different time zones each see the session at the correct local time for them.