Microsoft Bookings lets you create online pages where others can book appointments from specified date and time ranges for a particular event or project. The booked appointments appear automatically in your connected calendar.
Accessing Bookings
Bookings can be accessed through Office 365 from the app picker (š symbol at top-left, aka the "waffle") under All Apps.
Your personal Bookings page
Even if you've never created a Bookings page before, you can create a personal Bookings page that you can use to allow others to schedule time with you for any reason. To access and manage your personal Bookings page, go to the Bookings app and click the Create Meeting Type button on the left.
Here you'll configure the options for the type of meeting you'd like people to be able to book with you. You can add a title, category, description, location, duration, set the privacy, and choose to either connect it to your existing Outlook calendar settings or instead set custom availability.
Note that when creating a Bookings meeting type, an associated
Teams meeting will automatically be created for it. You can choose to disable this by toggling the Teams meeting switch off in the
Location field.
Creating a shared Bookings page
In addition to your personal Bookings page, you can also create Bookings pages for specific purposes or projects, with their own timeslots and people available to book.
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To create a shared Bookings page, click the Create booking page button, then Create from scratch.
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Name your page in the "Business name" field. This is the name that will appear at the top of your bookings page.
Important note: The "business" should not be named "Stonehill College", but should instead be named whatever you want the top of the booking page to be titled. An example of a good "business" name would be something like āService Desk Consultationā or "Office hours".
Keep in mind that each booking page also creates an associated Stonehill email address of the same name. This could cause problems if the name is too similar to existing individual or institutional email addresses. Therefore, we strongly recommend including your full name in the "business name" field for naming your booking page, such as "Ned Stark - Advising" or "Robert Baratheon - Office Hours" to ensure a unique title for your page, calendar, and associate email address.
Here you can also add a logo and select a business type if desired (these are optional).
Set your business hours for this page. Don't worry about specific slots just yet - this is simply the full range within which you'll set your availability later on.
- Add others as staff, if desired. "Staff" in this case are others who will be bookable via this page, or to help administrate it.
- Create the service(s) you want to be available on this booking page. If you're using it for a single general purpose (such as office hours), you can just create the one.
- Choose who you'd like to be able to access this page, and click the Create button.
- Once created, you'll be able to share the link to the page with others. You'll also receive an email with a link to your Bookings app where you can manage all your pages.
Managing your page
- Bookings can be accessed through Office 365 from the app picker (š symbol at top-left, aka the "waffle") under All Apps. Choose the page you want to manage.
- The next page has a menu on the left where you can access all aspects of your booking page:
- Calendar - This shows your Outlook calendar, but only the appointments booked via your page. If your bookings page is new, this will be empty.
- Booking page - This is where you can manage and customize the page itself that users see.
- Staff - Here you can manage any staff added to the page.
- Services - Add, remove and edit services available via the booking page.
- Business information - Customize the "business" associated with this page.
Check out Microsoft's support page for more on Microsoft Bookings.