Bookings

Microsoft Bookings

Microsoft Bookings allows faculty, staff, and departments to provide services on an appointment basis.  Use Bookings to specify services (advisee appointments or office hours, for example), assign one or more staff to those services, and determine hours of availability.

Bookings generates a website that can be accessed by anyone in the world, though you can choose to limit Bookings to SU campus community members.  Customers can visit your Bookings page to book an open appointment.

Appointments from a Bookings page can be accessed by any person, but only SU faculty, staff, and select accounts can design and administer a Bookings page.  To design and administer a Bookings page, sign in with your SU account at https://portal.office.com.

Using Bookings

Get Started:

  • Log in to your SU account at https://portal.office.com, and look for the Bookings icon (in the app launcher or left hand menu)
  • Add your Business information – name, location, available hours, logo, etc.
  • Add your staff (use the “Add people” button to select an SU account). As the Bookings creator your SU account is pre-loaded to this page.
  • Create a service and assign staff
  • Publish your Booking page

Learn more by visiting this link: Overview of Bookings 

Business Information

Add your name, contact info, website (this is NOT the Bookings page url), and hours of availability (“business” hours).

When setting your business hours consider how you manage your Outlook calendar.  If you aren’t in the habit of reserving your lunch time or occasional breaks on your Outlook calendar, then the Bookings scheduling tool will see that time as free – someone may book you for an appointment during your lunch!  You can choose to manage availability by adjusting business hours, including adding multiple “open hours” for a single day.

Create one or more Services

Click Add a Service to create an appointment type – office hours, advising, consultation, etc.  Each Service can have a unique schedule, email reminder notifications, custom fields (including specific questions or instructions for your Service), and one or more assigned staff.

When you set buffer time, the buffer time is added to the assigned staff member’s appointment.  It is not visible to the customer but does influence the time slots the see available.

Price is an available field but does not need to be set.

If you only have one “staff” set for your services, you can add that Staff’s personal Zoom link to the email confirmation reminder.

Email notifications and reminders are a great way to automate the communication of reservation times, especially reserving the Outlook calendar time of the assigned staff and the customer.  But some appointment types may require more manual interaction than others, especially for services with multiple staff that require unique meeting URLs for Zoom or Teams.

Publish Your Bookings Page

Choose your page color theme, site-wide scheduling policy, and if a Seattle University (“my organization”) account is required to book an appointment.  Note there is no “save a draft”; when you click save your page is published.  You can un-publish a site at any time if you’re not ready for your updates to be available to everyone.

When you require an account from my organization, the customer must enter a valid SU account before seeing any part of your Bookings page.

When you click “save and publish” you will see the URL for your Bookings site in the following format: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/name_of_booking_site@redhawks.onmicrosoft.com/bookings/ .  Share this URL so that people can make appointments on your Bookings page.

Other tips:

  • Learn more about creating a Service offering here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/bookings/define-service-offerings?view=o365-worldwide
  • If you offer a 30 minute appointment with a 10 minute “before” buffer, then you (the Bookings service staff) will see the entire 40 minute reservation on your calendar that includes the 10 minute buffer. Your customer will only see the 30 minute appointment, and it will start after the buffer.  Example: You offer a 30 minute appointment with 10 minute before buffer.  Your calendar is busy 8am – 10am, and free from 10am until noon.  Your customer will see an available time slot starting at 10:10am.  If they accept that time slot, they will see an appointment from 10:10am – 10:40am.  Your calendar will be booked 10am – 10:40am.