Starting out with Microsoft Bookings: 4 steps
Microsoft Bookings makes it easy to open up your calendar to your customers or other stakeholders to ensure you can easily and efficiently maximize your engagement without spending a lot of time on the administrative back and forth that has traditionally been at the center of booking appointments.
The Bookings app is included in most Microsoft 365 licenses for Business or Enterprise and allows you to set up a simple web page from which your contacts can book appointments with you or members of your team.
These four steps will get you started.
Open up the Bookings app and create your first bookings calendar
Booking icon in the Office launcher
You will be given the opportunity to name your business (note that this will be the name of the bookings page, so in many organizations there will be a more logical "title" than just the name of the business itself). Don't worry too much about the business type as everything is fully customizable in the next stages.
Get started by setting up your first Bookings calendar
Select the staff who should be part of your team for this booking calendar
Microsoft Bookings overview page
You can use Bookings solo or as part of a team. For team use you might, for example, have your entire sales team available to take appointments. However, it is equally useful if you use it solo as a personal booking calendar just for your own appointments.
Select to Add new staff if needed
To add staff, go to the Manage Staff page and Add New Staff.
Dialog box for adding new staff
Create your service or services and add staff to those services
To manage or create your services, go to the Manage services page and either Add new service or select a service and Edit service.
Dialog box for editing or adding a service
You can create a whole range of services depending on the nature of your business. These can be free or payable, and scheduled to take any amount of time. You can also select for an appointment to be an online meeting, meaning that the appointment that's set will include a Teams link for you and your contact. Other platforms such as Zoom are not supported, but a way around this would be to include your personal meeting room info in your confirmation email and then use that location for your Zoom meeting.
Different services enable you to break down appointments with different descriptions, lengths, spacings in between, available staff, or meeting location/formats. A good example of where you might see many different services would be a hair salon.
Ensure that for each service you have added staff through the Assign staff form or no one will be bookable for this service on your bookings page.
Configure your booking page and get a link
Decide how to publish your Bookings page
The last thing to do is to open up your booking page. You can select that your page either be available just to people in your organization (internal self-service) or available to anyone. Once you save your selection you will be provided with a link for the page.
Example booking page for end user
One great way to use the link you just generated is to include it in your email signature. That way anyone you are sending an email to about a meeting can set up their appointment without having to email back.
Once an appointment is set, it will appear in your Outlook calendar like any other meeting and the appointment will be sent to your customer or contact. Depending on the settings you have specified for the service, reminder messages can be sent to your contact and to you.
There are just a few caveats you should know in using this.
Most importantly, even though the services can be set-up as chargeable, Bookings has no mechanism to collect payments and there is no connector for Power Platform that might enable you to connect into another system to automatically send a customer a bill.
You can set up custom fields, but you cannot entirely customize the form the person booking fills out. If you need a fully customized booking process, then this will not fit that need.
If the staff you select do not properly use their Outlook calendar to denote their booked time (and work hours) outside of Bookings but have appointments that might come from elsewhere, this solution will lead to confusion. Users must adopt the Outlook calendar as their source of truth for calendaring in order for Bookings to be able to add value. You can get around this in the app for staff who will purely be booked through Bookings, but in my experience for those with hybrid needs, an up-to-date Outlook calendar is essential!
For more information on Microsoft Bookings, check out the links below:
