Microsoft Bookings is an application that allows people to make and manage appointments. For example, office hours, consultations or service visits. It is available to all faculty and staff, but requires some initial setup. To request that it be enabled for your unit or group, open a Service Request and select "Create New Bookings Site".
Bookings has two primary components:
- A booking page where your clients can schedule appointments with you or your group (the service providers). This page can be shown on existing Web pages. You can also create a link to a booking page for a specific service.
- A bookings management portal where client preferences, staff lists and schedules, services and pricing, service hours and other settings are configured. There is also a mobile app available for Android and iOS platforms where service providers can see bookings, access client lists, and create manual bookings.
Booking Page
The booking page is the interface through which your clients make appointments. We recommended one booking page for an entire department or service unit, instead of a booking page per user. This page will provide a list of services and available times.
For example, an academic department could list: academic counselling appointment (30 minutes with a faculty member), technical support consultation (30 minutes with a technician), exam viewing (10 minutes with a teaching assistant). All of these services will be provided on a menu, and the client selects a service, and then the list of available times are presented, based on the availability of specific staff who are listed as providers for each service.
You may create a link directly to your booking "service" to put on your website, brightspace site, or in an e-mail. To do this, go to your Bookings Page, and under Services select the service you want to link to, and copy the link. You can then paste this link as necessary.
Here is a sample Bookings user-facing page.
Bookings Management Portal
The administration portal is is accessible from portal.office.com application menu (nine dots icon in the top left corner of the page). If you do not see the Bookings icon on the vertical navigation rail on the left, click on All Apps icon (last icon on the bottom of the navigation rail). This will bring up a full list of apps that you are licensed for and the Bookings icon will be there.
If the splash page for Bookings comes up, click on the Get it now button.
Otherwise, click on Discover calendars. Do not click on Create new calendar as you will get an error message since users do not have access to create new calendars.
In a dialogue box, type the first few characters of your department’s name in the search bar and press enter. Your departmental bookings site full name should appear in the search results; click on it to open your site's management portal.
Once you open the bookings management portal app, you'll see the a navigation pane on the left and three prominent tiles that guide you through setup and introduce new features.
To configure your bookings site, follow these steps:
Address Book Entry
Your booking app will appear in the Outlook address book, since Bookings uses a special group calendar. The standard naming format for these calendars is Name of Group Bookings
Group Bookings
All bookings are made with a single a single staff member but. While by default only one person can book a particular time slot, you can configure each service to allow multiple bookings per time slot. The ceaveat is that once you create a service and set this value to "1" you will not be able to change it without deleting the existing service and re-creating it while setting the value to a different number. This option is useful for situations like tutorials or training sessions.