Forum Discussion
Announcement: Bring in business 24/7 with Microsoft Bookings
To help make appointment scheduling simpler and more efficient for you, your staff and your customers, Microsoft is introducing a new Office 365 service called Microsoft Bookings!
Customers can schedule your business directly online
Reduce missed appointments with confirmations and reminders
Make it easy for your customers to reschedule or cancel bookings
Manage bookings and customer information from anywhere
Automatically add bookings on staff calendars
Bookings is now rolling out in First Release to customers who subscribe to the Office 365 Business Premium plan and will roll out to all Business Premium customers worldwide in the coming months. Read more of Office Blogs.
37 Replies
Seems pretty lame that it would only be available in the business plans and not the enterprise plans, in fact it really just makes no sense. Random choice but perhaps there are plans we are not yet aware of. Either way good for our customers that subscribe to the business plans.
+1000 :)
What's the URL For the services ? like https://tasks.office.com for planer
- Great!!! We are waiting for it to come to E3 and E5.
- Great stuff! Can't wait for it to come to E5.
Definitly tool for EDU organisations, like mine.
Exam planning tool.
Fill in time table based on: avalability teacher staff, location , etc.
- Yes it will be, you can find a comment in the Q & A section stating that Bookings will be brought to other Office 365 plans and not only business ones
- Fabulous! We use calendly but wil be much happier with an integrated product. Woot!
- Awesome!!!
- +1 for making it available for Enterprise. I have loads of clients who would love this. I'm looking forward to giving it a go.
- +1000
Here's the official reply from the Q&A on the blog.
"Thanks for your interest in Bookings! We started rolling out Bookings to Office 365 Business Premium because it was designed with small businesses in mind. We know that there are small businesses in our Enterprise SKUs in all segments (Commercial, Government, EDU, Not-for-Profit), and we are working to bring Bookings to E3 and E5 in the coming months."
This is a great addition to the Office 365 app family. Will this be made available for Enterprise plans as well?
That was my first thought too. I think it would be useful option for individuals in Enterprise to make their calendar available for external contacts to book time. Would help reduce the too an fro of asking what time you're available. I share a link to my published calendar in Exch Online. But my external contacts cant book time from it. Just use it as a guideline of when I'm available.
Bookings is more designed for customers to make an appointment with a services provider. The dog groomer is a good example. There are some good third-party Cloud solutions for this in the market but none so far made by Microsoft. This helps Microsoft capture a need of the small businesses that chosen to power their businesses with Office 365.
From an SMB perspective the downside I can see is lack of financial integration. Most other appointment booking solutions via the web include invoicing and then integraton with financial products like Xero. In the age of automation, I'm double-handling if I have to handle customer bookings in one system but invoice them in another. Of course this depends on the circumstances of the business and the service, but it's a good reason why I might choose something else instead of Microsoft Bookings.
For Enterprise people and their external contacts, I guess the closest you get outside of your solution is the FIndTime or Boomerang add-ons to Outlook?
-Sonia
