You must have booked an online appointment on sites for small businesses or salon or some kind of services but did you know that there is an service provided by Microsoft 365 as well for these kind of bookings. Although it has been around since 2016 it was made available for all E3 and E5 licenses recently.
I must say that Bookings App / service is very easy and intuitive to use, let’s have a quick walkthrough first and then we can look into some scenarios where it can be useful.
- Booking page: Page is configurable in all aspects such as how booking page can be accessed, some text about data usage and control, scheduling policy, how to notify users, color theme of page. Check a screenshot below
- Customers: You can add customers or import them as well
- Staff: You can add staff and their availability schedule
- Services: You can add what kind of services you provide
- Business information: You can add more than one Business
- You can create booking page which can be only accessed internally in organization
- Customize email notifications
- You can share booking socially and you can also disable the option if you want
- Reports: You can download data upto 120 days
- Booking is also available as an App in Microsoft Teams which makes it easy to use for organizations
- Data can be accessed via Graph API if you want to build applications or further extend functionalities, read more here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/booking-api-overview?view=graph-rest-beta
Overall very rich functionalities and will meet your needs. Ability to access data via Graph API enables lot of possibilities.
In general Microsoft 365 Bookings can be used by enterprise, small companies, shops to enable bookings in their public facing sites but apart from this it can be used internally by enterprises for various purposes.
- Appointments for Service Desk kiosks
- Appointments with HR for queries
- Appointments with finance for resolutions
This was a quick walkthrough of Bookings in Microsoft 365.
If you want to try out Bookings I have created a demo which you can utilize
https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/Test@cgikislay.onmicrosoft.com/bookings/
Connect with me on Twitter or Linked In if you need more information.
Resources and references:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-bookings-blog/bg-p/Office365BusinessAppsBlog
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/scheduling-and-booking-app
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/booking-api-overview?view=graph-rest-beta
Kislay Sinha 