Microsoft 365 Bookings is a solution within Microsoft 365 which helps setting your appointments with your customers/clients. These appointments are booked directly in your Office 365 calendar. These appointments automatically have the contact information registered. In these times, this is written during the COVID-19 pandemic, it will come in usefull to have an appointment creation tool.
Prerequisites Microsoft 365 Bookings
This feature a part of the business subscriptions within Microsoft 365. If you use Office 365 E3 you need to add the Microsoft 365 bookings subscription. You can do this with the instruction from Microsoft via this link:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-access-to-microsoft-bookings-5382dc07-aaa5-45c9-8767-502333b214ce?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us
You need to check if bookings is enabled. You can do so by going through the following steps:
1. Go to the Microsoft 365 admin portal: https://admin.microsoft.com/
2. Go to settings:
3. Go to settings:
4. Go to Bookings:
5. This settings enables of disables bookings:
Furthermore the other settings on this page represent the following setttings:
“Block social sharing options”: I advise to enable this setting if you don’t use Facebook for commercial purposes.
“Require staff approvals”: This is usefull for when a teamlead needs to keep control over the appointment of his/her team. Make sure to notify the customer though!
Create a Booking site
The Microsoft 365 enviroment is ready to have users create their booking sites.
Create a test user and go to https://portal.office.com/
Open Outlook first so a mailbox is available for bookings to create appointments for.
Go to Office 365 App launcher:
And select Bookings:
If you don’t see this App go back to the prerequisites section.
Click on “Get it now”:
A pop-up shows the options to choose a calendar. Add a booking calendar:
Fill in some information, for example:
You are now on the homepage of your booking site and from here you can set the specifics.
Firstly set the staff that can be booked through this booking site. Go to “Staff”:
Here you can add and/or remove users to the booking site.
Go to the Booking Page setting on the left hand side:
On this page you can set the booking options. This are some examples:
Change the color theme:
Set the scheduling policy
Set custom availability
When you are done you need to publish the bookingsite. You can do so by clicking on “Save and publish” at the top of the page:
When the bookingsite is published you can access via this button or copy and share the link:
This is the booking page now available:
Let Microsoft 365 Bookings book your appointments.
Good to know
By default the events booked in the bookingsite will be added to the office 365 calendar:
Every user with a booking license is available for booking. Be carefull with who you assign the bookingsite to!
The disable direct search enige indexing of booking page is turned off:
You can add an online meeting link directly to the booking:
