How to use the Bookings application

Introduction

Bookings is an interactive Web application that is built into Office365 which establishes a dedicated calendar for appointments that will allow students to book appointments for specific services on campus. Through Bookings, you are able to keep track of individual student preferences, manage employee/student employee lists, explain services and pricing for the services, set the hours that are available for appointments, and customize how your staff and appointments are scheduled.

Instructions

How to navigate to Bookings from Outlook online

1. Inside of outlook.office.com click on the tile’s icon  and click on all app's, then click on Bookings.This will take you to your Bookings configuration page. 
2. Now you should be inside of bookings.  Inside bookings you will want to create a bookings page.  To do so click on the Customize your bookings page.  If you have already created your page you will need to click where your page name is on the left hand side of the screen and click the drop down arrow and choose New to build a new page. 
3. In the next section fill out Business name and Business type.
4. Wait for the page to finish building this can take 30 seconds to a minute to finish.  Once it has completed you are brought back to the Home page.  From here you can check your calendar, look at your Bookings page, check Customers, Create and manage Staff members, add services, and edit your Business information.
5. Click on Add Logo to add your company logo.  Choose upload new logo and then choose your logo from your local computer or shared drive.  Then click on Save.
6. You can choose to change the background of your logo icon with the tools included in Bookings. Once you are satisfied with the colors click save again. 
7. Now your Bookings Logo should appear on the Home page. 
8. From the Home page click on Bookings Page.
9. Put a checkmark in Require a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 account from my organization to Book and Disable direct search engine indexing of bookings page. You can also change the color theme to your bookings page.
10. A very important feature to turn on is Send a meeting invite to the customer in addition to the confirmation email.  This will provide a link to your client to join a Microsoft Teams meeting. 
11. Once you are satisfied with your Bookings page at the very top of the page click on the Save and publish arrow.

Adding Staff to Bookings

1. Click on Staff and the Manage staff page will appear.  You will notice that your name is automatically in the window.  This is because you created this page.  Click on Add staff to begin putting in staff for Bookings. 
2. Where you see Add People start typing the name of someone in your organization.  We are part of the Microsoft Single Tennant so it should auto populate that person's name and email address.
3. When you see the email address in that list with the name of desired employee click on it. 
4. Now the employee is populated in the page.  At this time, you need to decide if the employee is a viewer, guest, or administrator. 

Administrator

• The administrator can edit all settings, add and remove staff, and create, edit, or delete bookings.

Viewer

• 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.
  • Receive email reminders of upcoming bookings
  • Receive notifications of cancellations and changes

Guest

• 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
• Receive email reminders of upcoming bookings 
• Receive notification of cancellations and challenges 

5. Once you have decided what role you want your staff member to be you can put their schedule in on the right-hand side of the screen or you can leave them on default business hours.  If your business hours are from 8am to 5pm it will sync with each staff members Microsoft exchange calendar and assist in scheduling on the Bookings Page. 

• Events on Office calendar affect availability and should be checked for all staff members. 
  • Use business hours is up to calendar administrator or up to each staff member if they are given admin rights.  You can choose to have staff selected for a booking.  By letting staff members set their schedule this will make sure a booking for them is not outside of their work hours. 
  • Once you are done with setting up your staff member you can click on the Save button at the top of the webpage.

6. At the very bottom of the page should already be a checkbox pre-checked (Notify the staff via email when a booking assigned to them is created or changed) you can choose to leave it checked or unchecked I leave it checked. 
7. At this time, you should now have the staff member added and in your staff list. 

How to add services in Bookings

1. Click on  to Add a service. 
2. Click on '+ Add a service' to add your service.

• On this page you will get to create your service.  Service Name (I have called this one 'Remote Support'). 

Description Enter in the description of your service.  This will be seen by anyone looking to book this service.

Default Location Choose the office, or room you plan to have the meeting.  For a remote session I am choosing my own location as Online. 

Add online meeting You will want to have this turned on if you are having an online meeting.  This way a Microsoft Teams meeting will be created and scheduled when this service is scheduled.

Default Duration You can set how long you want the time to be for this service.

Buffer Time  You can set increments in between each booking for your staff members.  This could be 15 minutes, 10 minutes, you can decide, the increments start at 5 minutes.   

Enable Customers to manage their appointments when booked by you or your staff on their behalf.

Maximum Attendees  You can choose if this service is just for one person to be a part of or if you can have multiple persons. 

Notes (internal only) Only staff can see these notes, they are not client facing.

     3. Custom Fields  You can set custom fields on your booking page that are required to be filled in by person scheduling a booking.  These could be email, phone number, or customer notes.  This is a helpful tool to make sure clients filling out these bookings can be reached in case a booking is canceled or changed. 

     4. When the custom fields are highlighted you then can check the required field.  Then click OK and then you will be prompted to save on the next page. 

Reminders and Confirmations This area lets you add a reminder on the day of the appointment.  It is automatically set to 1-day reminder. 

Add an email reminder You can add an additional email reminder for a specific date and time and custom information. 

Additional information for Email Confirmation This is a custom message that will be sent with every email confirmation for a time booked. 

Enable text message notifications for your customer This will send a text message to customer/client if they fill out their phone information. 

Publishing options I leave these boxes checked.  If you want to change the default scheduling policy, you can uncheck it and add your own custom schedule for this service.

Email notifications These settings are automatically checked, they will send an email to all staff members in the Bookings page as well as the individual who scheduled the booking. 

Staff You can leave this checked and your clients/customers will be able to specifically choose which staff member they want to schedule for their booking.  In a previous booking I showed how you can setup your staff members working hours so only those times will be available for each staff member.  If you deselect this option then bookings will automatically assign a staff member this booking within their work availability.  To deselect any of the options you must UNCHECK Use the default scheduling policy.

General availability You can adjust this to Bookable when staff are free, Not bookable, and Custom hours(recurring weekly).

Creating a Microsoft Booking and Managing it

1. Open the Bookings Page Tab and if you have published your page you should see the Open published page.  If you do not have this option yet, please click on save and publish at the top of the page.  Then click on Open published page.
2. Your Microsoft bookings page should now be open.
3. Select service go ahead and select one of the services you have created.  I will select Remote Support.
4. Once you choose your service you will now be able to choose a date and time to schedule your booking.
5. You can see that this service is setup where anyone can book an available employee.  Therefore, there is a name available.  You can change this setting under your services and specific service to only book an available time.  You would uncheck the box under Staff (allow customers to choose a specific person for the booking.
6. With those settings changed and saved you will now see only times.  No staff members available.
7. Select your date and time for your service. 
8. Fill out the information boxes and click on the Book button and your Booking will be saved.
9. There may be a Working on it... screen for some time. When completed it should look like the images below.
10. The person who scheduled the booking should receive an email confirming the Bookings.  There is an option below the calendar date and time to Manage the booking.

For Customer Use

1. Click on Manage booking it should bring you to a webpage.  On this webpage you can see the booking.
2. The options listed are Reschedule, Cancel booking, or New booking.
3. On the Bookings Admin side of this you can see and manage all appointments that come in through the Bookings application.  From the Bookings page click on Calendar.
4. As you can see the remote support session was created.  You can click on the session and edit it.
5. Once you have clicked on edit you can choose to re-assign who will handle the booking if needed.  The person who is highlighted with a checkmark will be the one in charge of the booking.  Everything else in this page is just reflecting the service offer and additional email reminder options. 

To find your bookings page

1. To lookup a bookings page you will need to click on the small down arrow next to your booking page name.  See image below. 
2. Then click on Open and then type in the first word of your booking page, or if you know the complete name type that in.  Then click on the magnifying glass
3. Typing in SCSU, now it will give me a list of all SCSU pages created in bookings for our school.
4. Once the desired page is found, click on it and it will open the desired booking page.  Whenever a staff member comes back to bookings it should bring them to the last page they visited. 

Helpful Bookings Links

• Microsoft Bookings Overview
• Microsoft Bookings Introduction Video
• Microsoft articles to help you get started with Bookings:
  • Overview of Microsoft Bookings
  • Create Your Staff List
  • Define Your Service Offerings
  • Customize Your Bookings Page
  • Enter Your Business Information
  • Publish or Unpublish Your Bookings Page