Take Care of Your Scheduling Needs with Microsoft Bookings and Scheduler in Microsoft 365

Question for someone @ MS, what would users be gaining with Scheduler that is worth £7.50 a month versus just using FindTime?

The scheduler service is a fantastic feature but tough to justify an additional monthly cost, especially for customers subscribed to E3 and E5 licenses. Any consideration to bundling at those license levels?

Shaun_SIA the fix for SMS timezone issue is being worked on actively and ETA to get the fix rolled out to everyone is 11/22.

Sally_Richardson : First: Thank you for taking the time and reply to feedbacks here, I am sure you are also incredibly busy with regular work, so this means a lot.

I work at MS and I use the bookings (and got my whole team to use it) to give the chance to the partners we work with to be able to easily schedule calls/meetings with us.

I do like the idea of Bookings, but I have personally have some issues:

The email we get sent from the app: it only shows the most basic information.  If we have custom fields (as I imagine a lot of users would to get more specific info from the bookings), none of those are actually included in the email. My booking form looks like this with my custom fields: Partner Name, PDM, Additional Participant Emails. 

That's all great, however, the email I get looks like this:

I think all the real world users would agree that having the custom fields and the answers to them in the email from Booking would greatly add to its usefulness.  Currently, you literally have to go to your bookings application to see those details, which is counter-productive. Please get them to add the custom fields to the outlook email that is sent.

Also: while having the ability to Add online meeting to the booking appointment is a good idea, in reality it is very limiting as it goes to its usability.  Since the appointment gets created by an account created at the time of Bookings setup, ie: KatsBookings@microsoft.onmicrosoft.com and not on behalf of me or the "assigned staff", the Organizer will be set to the booking persona and thus taking away the ability to add/remove attendees, change Subject, date/time if needed from the outlook calendar.  I personally need to be able to change all of those properties (and know that most Bookings users would also), and in this original form: can not. Default event in Outlook from Bookings:

Outlook event created based on Bookings event with Flow:

I had to implement a custom flow that extracts all the information I need for the meeting, create the Title/Subject to fit my needs and create a new meeting invite where I am the organizer and have the ability to control/modify the event from Outlook.  In case of having more than one staff on a booking, the assigned staff should be able to edit the bookings.  There are countless posts on these forums on complaining the way the bookings show up in the Outlook calendars, and our inability to customize the event Subject, so if no custom flows are at work, all booking events have the same exact subject, which is not very informative for the users.  Ideally, I want to be able to construct on the bookings service setup page on what the Subject line should look like, including the ability to use the Custom Fields to be part of the booking.  In my case, I would want my subject line to be: [Partner Name] - [Custom Text]

From reading hundreds of posts in the feedback forums, that is also a highly desired functionality.

Please forward the above highly requested changes to the engineering team who works on the Bookings.

Sharing some helpful links:
- You can read more details about both planned features in our blog post
- You can find details on Scheduler dynamic recurring meetings in our documentation 

- See last years Ignite video on setting up a Bookings calendar 

- Watch last year's Ignite video on using Scheduler 
- Watch last year's Ignite video on using Bookings 

We would like to use Microsoft Bookings but the SMS notification feature is still not fixed.  The initial text notification that an appointment has been set, has the incorrect time.  For example, I set an appointment for 11/09/21 at 11 a.m. and the text message displayed the appointment as 11/09/21 at 3 a.m.  

Just getting into using Bookings and it seems a pretty decent tool, albeit one that needs to be slightly tricked into what we're trying to do which is have an open to the Internet room booking system for our students. One request, and I know from researching this on the Internet that I am not the only one, is the option to make multiple staff an AND not an OR - if I have 3 members of staff assigned to a service, I need all three of them to be free for the service to be available, not any one of them.

I know it has been a long time since anyone posted on here, but I wanted to share some feedback in case Sally_Richardson still monitors these comments! Thank you for your responsiveness above btw.

Not sure what's on your roadmap, but after using MSBookings for 1+ years, the single most valuable feature I'd love to see next is a button / link in the automated reminder messages (email & SMS) for users to navigate to reschedule / cancel their appointment.

In December 2021, we shifted from manually sending appointment reminders to using automated reminder messages from MSBookings, and our appointment no show rates have nearly doubled. I hypothesize that a reminder communication is the biggest trigger for someone to realize "oh, I can't make that anymore!" however, the user has to navigate back to their original confirmation email to take any action. It's too much effort, so people just don't show up.

No shows have a big impact on businesses who use Bookings. We're paying staff to be available for an appointment that otherwise could have gone to another user.

The deal breaker for our staff for the bookings calendar is the lack of abillity to create recurring appointments. It is far too tedius to add them in one by one. Trying to figure out how to use Scheduler for this task (integration with the bookings calendar) but that is being discontinued in Sept 2023. So I am really hoping that the bookings calendar will add the option to change appointments to recurring ones. Please, please, please....

Hello Does anyone know how to make the dates of the available bookings services bold on the calendar - we are having difficulty seeing what sessions are available as they do not stand out 

7th is an available session but I would like it to be easier to spot.