Microsoft Bookings - Appointment Scheduling

Microsoft Bookings is a scheduling tool you can use to allow others to book time with you or with your staff. It's available on the Office 365 apps grid for those who are licensed for it:

• Faculty and staff who are licensed for Teams Voice also have access to Bookings. This includes student employees who are licensed to answer a Teams Voice call queue for their department.
• If you do not see Bookings on the Office 365 Apps grid, and you would like to use Bookings, contact the Help Desk by clicking the Get Help tab at the top of this page.

Bookings Components

Business Name & Type 

You do not have to specify a type of business, but you do need to provide a name. Choose a name that is descriptive and specific. As the owner of this business in Bookings, you will also be the administrator (but you can add others as administrators as well). You can include general business hours, phone number, website URL, and more on the Business Information page. 

Booking Page

Customize the look of the page others will use to book appointments. When you publish the page, you will be able to copy the address of your Bookings page to share with others in places like your website or in your email signature. 

You can also set scheduling policies on your Bookings Page that include time increments as well as the maximum and minimum lead times for booking.

Staff

You can add other staff if you manage employees and you would like them to provide the services being booked. You can also add a shared mailbox as a staff member in Bookings. If you would like someone else to co-manage the business with you in Bookings, you can elevate them to an administrator. 

Services

You must create at least one service. You can create multiple services and assign different staff (or the same staff) to each one, depending on your need. Each service can inherit the scheduling policies you define on the Booking Page, or you can configure a unique scheduling policy for a service. You can also copy a link to a specific service to share with others.

Services can list a location where they are provided, or you can select the option to "Add an online meeting" and a Teams meeting will be scheduled for the booked appointment. You can add custom fields for registration if you want to capture more information before the appointment. Custom confirmations and reminders can also be added. 

Calendar

Shows you all appointments on the schedule. The staff member who is assigned to an appointment will also see the appointment on their personal Outlook calendar (if you add a shared mailbox as a staff member, the appointment will appear on that shared mailbox's calendar). 

Customers

You can use the customer list to maintain notes and phone numbers for your customers, but a customer does not need to be in this list before they can book an appointment. On the Bookings Page you can decide whether to allow anyone to book an appointment, or to limit it to WWU faculty, staff, and students.

Additional help and tips

• You can choose whether to restrict an appointment time to a single individual, or you can allow multiple people to schedule the same time slot. You can also have Bookings schedule buffer time in between appointments. 
• Need to change your schedule? You can update the available hours on your Booking Page or on an individual service any time, and you can also set different availability for a specific date range if your service availability is different during holidays, intersessions, or vacations.
• You can choose to let staff availability be affected by events on their Outlook calendar, or you can ignore a staff member's calendar for the purpose of booking appointments. Any administrator can move an appointment from one staff member to another. 
• If you need to un-assign a staff member from a service, go to the service in Bookings and click the staff member at the bottom of the service page to remove the checkmark next to their name. Only staff with the checkmarks will be scheduled for that service.
• Shared mailboxes are useful to assign as the only staff member when you have student employees who work shifts. The employee who is on-shift can check the shared mailbox calendar for upcoming appointments. The only caveat is that some appointment details are available only through the Bookings app, especially when you allow multiple people to book the same appointment time. 
• Unless you charge a fee, leave the default price set to "Price not set" so no price is displayed on the booking form.

Create a Bookings page to allow others to schedule time with you

Microsoft's Documentation for Bookings