Just the basics.

I archive this page on our department's SharePoint twice a year. Its purpose is to help anyone who is newer to live Folio usage get set up in a way that averts common errors. It's currently meant for team members who will be, or may be, stewarding a live Folio appointment type for their location, and would need to tailor settings to their location's needs.

This is meant to be a quick-loading, one-page resource that limits the need to open other browser tabs. It still links out to some key SharePoint files and folders for further learning. All external links open in new tabs.

This file was last updated on 2026-05-05.

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• A. Get Folio configured with your Zoom details
• Set up your personal Zoom room
• Set up your Folio profile with your Zoom credentials


• B. Get your calendars configured
• Know your consultant ID and the URL to your openings
• Mutually share Folio appointment calendars
• Feed your Folio calendar to Outlook


• C. Get familiar with your Folio appointment type
• Review your appointment type’s default settings
• If you need to adjust your settings


• D. Get acquainted with Folio’s live features
• What we’ll cover together
• Quick rules of thumb for appointments
• Quick rules of thumb for events


• Eugenia’s SharePoint folder of Folio documentation (opens in new tab )
• Some basic Folio terminology and tips on how the system thinks

A. Get Folio configured with your Zoom details.

Sign in to your institutional Zoom account and configure your personal room  

1. Make it easy, but secure, for students to join your meeting room:
1. When you sign into your institutional Zoom account , you'll land on your profile page. Scroll down to a section called Meeting where you'll see your Personal Meeting ID and Personal Link, which is an editable alias for your Personal Meeting ID.
2. Zoom redacts your full Personal Meeting ID with asterisks. Click the eye icon to reveal your full ID, room URL, and passcode. This is your personal Zoom room, which you'll use for online appointments.
3. To adjust its security settings, go to Meetings in the lefthand sidebar, then the Personal Room tab, then scroll to the bottom and hit Edit. This is where you can activate your Waiting Room to ensure you meet with only one student at a time.
4. You can also require meeting joiners to UTOR-authenticate here, but checking that box will cause students who are using non-institutional Zoom accounts to be rejected from joining without explanation. So, leave that box unchecked. If you start to encounter ineligible joiners, you can check it, but we haven't had this problem yet.
5. On that same Edit page, if you hit Show next to Options, you'll see more custom options: you can add alternative hosts, ensure that participants can't join anytime, or limit entry to certain regions.
2. Copy and paste your Zoom room's URL and passcode into a notepad file for use in our next step.

Set up your Folio profile with your Zoom credentials  

1. Sign in to your Folio admin console and click your name on the lower left.
2. Select Edit my details in the middle of the screen.
3. Scroll to the bottom and paste the URL of your personal Zoom meeting room into the URL field under Default online meeting room.
4. Paste the passcode to your personal Zoom room into the Instructions field, prefaced by "Passcode:" to clarify its meaning to students. Then hit save.

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B. Get your calendars configured.

Know your consultant ID and bookmark the associated URL, through which students can see your openings  

1. Every Folio appointment provider has a stable URL that brings students to a view of that provider's open appointments. Your stable URL is built from your consultant ID.
2. You have your consultant ID from completing your Folio profile setup, above. For a complete, current list of teamwide consultant IDs, see column D in this reference sheet that I maintain on SharePoint .
3. To produce a stable URL that yields a view of your, and only your, appointment openings, paste your seven-digit consultant ID into the placeholder portion of this URL structure:
https://folio.utoronto.ca/students/appointments/app/?consultantId=PLACEHOLDER&siteId=1

Mutually share Folio calendars  

1. Go to Engagement > Appointments > Sharing and search for colleagues in our department to share your Folio calendar with them. Here's a complete, running staff list that I maintain on SharePoint.
2. Norms may slightly differ across teams, but please enable Edit access for any colleague with data-pulling responsibilities (Eugenia, Team Leads, Director). Please also share your calendar with Student Success front desk staff.
3. Enabling Feed access for any colleague lets them create an Outlook calendar of your Folio offerings. This is not critical for reporting, but some find it helpful.

Feed your Folio calendar to Outlook  

1. In Folio's admin console, go to Engagement > Appointments > Sharing, then scroll down to your name and hit the blue button that reads + Create feed. This will open a dialogue box.
1. If you use Outlook as a desktop program, hit the blue button and follow the prompts to have Outlook import the resulting.ics file.
2. If you access Outlook through your web browser, copy the URL that Folio is now showing you beneath the blue button, then follow the below steps. This route also works if you use Outlook's desktop client, as the client pulls the same information from the same server.
2. In Outlook's web interface, go to your Calendar, then hit Add calendar.
3. Then hit Subscribe from web, paste the URL you copied from Folio into the provided field, and import it to My calendars where prompted. You can give this calendar a custom name.
4. You'll then see your Folio calendar as a distinct calendar that you can overlay on your main Outlook calendar (under My calendars in the lefthand sidebar).
5. Note that what Folio feeds into Outlook is typically one business day behind.

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C. Get familiar with your Folio appointment type.

Review your default settings  

1. Our department has thirteen appointment types. The default settings for any type can be configured, within reason, in dialogue with your Team Lead and other providers who create appointment openings with it. Here are the default settings for our central appointment types:
1. Students can see and book appointment openings 14 days in advance, and they can see and book an opening up until 60 minutes before that opening's start time.
2. Within a 7-day period, a student can have a maximum of 2 bookings of each appointment type. This cap is based on time elapsing, not attendance status, so the cap resets as soon as the appointment slots are over, whether or not the student ever showed.
3. At any given moment, a student can have only 1 upcoming booking of each appointment type.
4. Students can cancel or modify their appointment booking up until 30 minutes before it starts.
2. If you are an on-location learning strategist who is embedded at a partner site, you can propose some adjustments to your appointment type's default settings in discussion with your Team Lead, based on your site's needs:
1. How many days in advance would you like your appointment openings to become visible to students? If unchanged, the default is 14 days.
2. How many minutes in advance should your appointment openings become invisible to, and unbookable by, students? If unchanged, the default is 60 minutes before an appointment's start time.
3. Within a 7-day period, what's the maximum number of bookings of your appointment type that any given student should be limited to? If unchanged, the default cap is 2 bookings of your type.
4. At any given moment, what's the maximum number of upcoming bookings of your appointment type that a given student can have? If unchanged, the default is 1 upcoming booking of your type.
5. How many minutes in advance should students be able to cancel or modify their appointment booking in Folio? If unchanged, the default is up until 30 minutes before the appointment starts.
3. Ready to suggest changes to the above defaults?
1. Open a new, blank email to Eugenia and Cristina .
2. Copy the above list of defaults for easy editing  
   1. How many days in advance would you like your appointment openings to become visible to students? If unchanged, the default is 14 days.
   2. How many minutes in advance should your appointment openings become invisible to, and unbookable by, students? If unchanged, the default is 60 minutes before an appointment's start time.
   3. Within a 7-day period, what's the maximum number of bookings of your appointment type that any given student should be limited to? If unchanged, the default cap is 2 bookings of your type.
   4. At any given moment, what's the maximum number of upcoming bookings of your appointment type that a given student can have? If unchanged, the default is 1 upcoming booking of your type.
   5. How many minutes in advance should students be able to cancel or modify their appointment booking in Folio? If unchanged, the default is up until 30 minutes before the appointment starts.
3. Paste it into your email and edit the values to what you prefer.
4. Would you like to adjust how your booking confirmation email reads? Have a look at the current default language here .
Copy this template for easy editing  
Hello [FirstName],

Thank you for booking a Learning Strategy appointment with [Counsellor]. Please note the mode of your appointment below.

While face-to-face appointments can be switched to virtual, the reverse isn't possible.

[BookingDetails]

[Note: the [BookingDetails] merge tag will display the appointment's date, start time, provider name, and location in an unchangeable format. If the appointment is online, the location will display as a URL beneath the line, "Join the meeting." If the location is on campus, the location will include a campus building code, room number, and street address, as recorded in Folio.]

Please ensure you have the time zone in Folio set to Eastern time (UTC-05:00, US & Canada). You can do this through 'Preferences' under your name in the top right of your Folio console.

What format is my appointment in? If you see a hyperlink just above your advisor's name (above), you've booked a virtual appointment. If you see an address above your advisor's name, you've booked an in-person appointment.

Where do I go for in-person appointments? My office is in [building name and room number]. The address is: [full street address].

What if I would like to switch my appointment format? You can change a face-to-face appointment to a virtual one, but not the other way around. To switch formats, sign into your Folio dashboard to change your appointment's format or to cancel it. Changes can be made up to 30 minutes before your appointment.

What if I need to cancel or reschedule? If you no longer need your appointment or are unable to attend, please cancel the appointment in your Folio dashboard so that it can be made available to another student.

How are virtual appointments offered? If you have not already done so, download Zoom and activate your University of Toronto Zoom account. Once activated, you'll be on U of T's Zoom educational license. You can log in at utoronto.zoom.us.

What to expect in an appointment: For a glimpse into our process, consider reviewing this pre-appointment Q&A handout crafted for students at all levels.

How far in advance can I book an appointment? Appointments can be scheduled 14 days in advance. If there are no available appointments, please wait a day for the next batch of appointments to be released.

Questions? Feel free to contact me or inquire with our front desk at clss@utoronto.ca.
5. Paste it into your email and edit the text to what you recommend for your site. Please be sure your edits are accompanied by a rationale.
6. Send that email to Eugenia and Cristina, and we'll talk it through as a group. Be sure to also apprise your colleagues at your partner site of any changes you make to how your appointment type works.
4. In addition to a booking confirmation, students also receive a reminder email at 8:00 a.m. the day before their appointment (an institutionally shared setting). Each appointment type's reminder language can also be customized, but is by convention a close duplicate of the type's confirmation email.

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D. Get acquainted with Folio’s live features.

Steps we’ll cover together  

1. When we meet for our initial training, we'll go through the process of creating and closing out a Folio appointment opening.
1. Depending on your role, we'll cover the peer mentorship intake form or the learning strategy appointment point-of-booking field .
2. We'll also cover useful pages to bookmark, how to run basic searches, and journal notes (only for learning strategists).
2. We'll also cover creating and closing out a Folio event listing.
1. We'll discuss a few steps distinct to OL events and WBR events , including forms and headcounts for internal reporting narrative.
2. Eugenia will fix any wonky labels or missing forms. I do this biweekly; the fixes are sporadic and trivial. However, I can't correct attendance, as I have no way to know who attended and who didn't.

Quick rules of thumb for appointments  

1. In Folio, appointments, forms, and journals aren't structurally linked by default: an appointment doesn't "take" a form, or "take" a journal note. Rather, journal notes are added to students, not to appointments. And forms get auto-attached to students who choose to complete them.
This is why we write an appointment's date at the top of a journal note in yyyy-mm-dd format: its date may differ from the note's date of creation. This is also why students are asked to add their appointment date in the peer mentorship intake form .
2. Journals are not visible to the students whose user profiles you're annotating, nor are journals visible to student colleagues.
3. Folio lets us lift a single, stable URL to any provider's appointment openings, but not to lift a single, stable URL to openings of a given appointment type.
4. Here's more of what we've learned about appointments .

Quick rules of thumb for events  

1. Event labels shape how events are reported and don't appear to students, whereas filters shape which events are visible to which subsets of students. Use filters to define who can see your event and therefore book into it.
2. Folio will auto-mark attendance for an online event, if and only if students join through its Folio waiting room (which redirects them to its Zoom waiting room). The URL structure for any event's Folio waiting room is as follows, substituting the actual event's seven-digit ID for the placeholder bit:
https://folio.utoronto.ca/students/Events/Online/PLACEHOLDER
1. To find any event's seven-digit ID, glance at the URL when you're in the event listing or event's admin dashboard.
2. Waiting room links are handy when you need to share an instantly joinable link with a latecomer or with a student who can't find the bookable event listing.
3. Here's more of what I've learned about events .

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