Microsoft Bookings

The traditional Microsoft Bookings service is best used for fulfilling a departmental or team need to offer services to outside customers.  Whether the Booking resources are staff that fulfill certain roles or is hardware that can be reserved, Bookings caters itself to pools of resources where you want a centralized view of what is reserved while also scheduling the event on the individual resources calendar as well. Bookings is intended for managing scheduling for a group of people.

• Multiple people or resources that fulfill the same role that is requested by outside customers
  
• Departmental oversight of aggregate reservations of resources
• Fixed time windows where resources are available
• Fixed length to reservations based on request type
• Resource users should only be assigned as resources

Public meeting types:

• Available to anyone that you share your Bookings page link with.
• Can be accessed by anyone that has your Bookings with me page address. You decide who you share your Bookings with me page address with.

Private meeting types: 

• Only available to people that you share the individual private meeting type with.
• Can also generate single use links. Single use links expire after their first booking.

An ITORG exception account is recommended as the owner of Bookings calendars to ensure business continuity. Resource users should not be the owner of the Bookings calendar, only assigned as resources.

A Bookings license is not required in order to be a resource on a Bookings calendar.  Only the creator or sub-administrators of the Bookings calendar need a license.

The Bookings calendar time zone may not be set correctly by default. The calendar owner can update this in the Bookings app.  

1. From inside your MS Bookings calendar webpage click on the Booking Page tab within the left-side menu
2. Below Region and time zone settings (at the bottom of the page), click Change language and time zone settings
   
3. Change the Current time zone to your current time zone
4. Only select Always show time slots in business time zone if you  always meet with people in your time zone. If it's not selected, when people are booking time with you they can choose how to display your availability based on their own time zone.

Make sure on the Staff details page, Events on calendar affect availability is checked.

Bookings has three different access levels:  Administrator, Viewer and Guest.

1. From the MS Bookings webpage, select the Staff tab on the left-side menu
2. Select + Add staff, located at the top of the Staff page
3. Select a color for the staff member, provide their initials, name, UB email address, and phone number
4. Set the access level for this staff member:
   • Administrator - Who: A UB employee that has a MS365 account - What: Can edit all settings, add and remove staff, create, edit, or delete bookings.
   • Viewer - Who: A UB employee that has a MS365 account - What: Can see your own bookings on your personal calendar, receive a meeting invitation when assigned to a booking so you can add it to your personal calendar (valid email address required), receive email reminders of upcoming bookings, receive notifications of cancellations and changes. They can't modify or delete them. They have read-only access to settings.
   • Guest - Who: Staff member who doesn't have a MS 365 account - What: Can be signed up to deliver booked services but cannot access Bookings, receive a meeting invitation when assigned to a booking so you can add it to your personal calendar (valid email address required), receive email reminders of upcoming bookings, receive notifications of cancellations and changes.
5. Select Save
6. Repeat steps 1-5 for each staff member you wish to add to your Bookings calendar.

If you would like someone else to be able to cancel appointments for you, make sure that person is added as an administrator, but is not available in the appointment as bookable.

When setting up your appointment offerings, select Price Not Set to not show a charge for appointments.

If you prefer to use Zoom instead of Teams, when setting up appointment offerings do not select “Add Online Meeting”. Instead, create a recurring Zoom meeting with no fixed time.  Add a link to that meeting in the text of the email confirmation.

Note: only staff in your Bookings site with the role of Administrator can cancel appointments. Appointments must be canceled from Bookings, and cannot be canceled from Outlook calendar.

1. From the left navigation menu in Microsoft Bookings, select Calendar.
2. Find and select the appointment you wish to cancel.
3. Select Cancel, provide a message to the person whose appointment is being canceled, and select Cancel Booking. This will notify the person via email and remove the entry from your Outlook calendar.

If a Bookings administrator modified the Customer Information within the Custom Fields of a service to not collect the "customer email" field, then Bookings cannot send the confirmation emails.

1. From the MS Bookings webpage, select the Services tab on the left-side menu
2. Select the service that is not sending confirmation emails
3. Click Modify under the Custom Fields area
4. Click customer email so that it is highlighted in grey
5. Click required next to customer email so a check mark appears
6. Click Ok
   
7. Click Save
8. Navigate to the booking page and test that the confirmation email is sent