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Mike_Payne's avatar
Mike_Payne
Copper Contributor
Jul 13, 2020

Service Double Bookings

Hi,

 

We have just started using Bookings and have run into an issue.

 

The service has ten staff and any of them can book an appointment with a customer. All appointments for this service have to take place in one specific meeting room that is accessible by customers.

 

We have found that if two different staff members make a booking for the same day and time the Booking system allows this to happen and there is no alert to anyone about it.

 

At the moment we have someone from Customer Services keeping an eye on the service calendar to check for double bookings. If they find one they then have to arrange with customers and staff to move one of the meetings. This is time consuming, inconvenient to the customer and not really a viable long term solution.

 

I am hoping there is a setting or configuration option we have missed that can prevent double bookings. Any help anyone can provide would be gratefully received.

 

Many thanks,

Mike

 

 

Bookings
  • Mike_Payne's avatar
    Mike_Payne
    Copper Contributor
    Jul 16, 2020
    I am guessing by the lack of response that it is not possible to stop MS Bookings from double booking services?
  • Annette1101's avatar
    Annette1101
    Brass Contributor
    Sep 17, 2020

    Mike_Payne We have the same challenge. Here is how we resolved. We currently have a department that allows appointments to apply for a marriage license. Although they have 4 staff in the department, they only have one room that can accommodate the service. So we added an Exchange room resource as a staff member for the marriage license service, and excluded the other 4 staff members. This will help us not to have multiple bookings for a time slot because there really is only one "staff" and that is the room.  We also removed the room to be booked by others in our organization by hiding it from GAL via Exchange server AD Component, Exchange Attributes on that room, with this command: msExchHidFromAddressLists=TRUE

    This avoids duplication of bookings. The only thing we have to make sure to check is that we have enough "staff" to perform the service since we do have other services they do and could already be booked for. For example, if we have 4 staff and they are all booked to do passport applications for 11:00 am, and a booking comes in for a marriage license, we have to make sure we can accommodate, which so far has not happened. 

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