Forum Discussion
Staff is shown as available even though an appointment is already booked
We're using the graph booking API to book appointments.
To find an available slot the assigned staff is got for a service and the availability is checked for all staff members. If at least one staff member is available the appointment is successfully booked.
Afterwards the staff member is shown available for 2 - 5 minutes. So the next try to book an appointment within this 2 - 5 minutes finds the same staff member and the slot is booked twice for the same staff.
When an appointment is cancelled the status change also needs some minutes.
I'm not 100% sure but I think this worked some month ago (currently only a prototype solution).
Also experiencing this issue.
the delay is causing double bookings for us.- Hi Zack,
Thanks for your feedback. Hope that MS provide a solution.
Guenter
- We have also been seeing this issue. We believe it has to do with the number of staff and services as well as the number of existing appointments.
This is essentially the ticket we submitted to MS support
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-bookings/microsoft-bookings-ignoring-staff-time-off-for-availability/m-p/4072398
They responded saying to look at this page and that the reason the issue was happening was because we have too many staff/services and are booking too far into the future (90 day max lead, 1hr increments, services are 1-3hrs length, ~8am-6pm Mon-Fri operating hours).
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-bookings-blog/scaling-bookings-for-large-demand/ba-p/2079749- I'm fairly certain it's not this. We've been running our booking page with around 35-40 staff and around 15 services for years without any issues. I've also tested a brand new booking page with a small number of staff and services, and the issue remains. This leads me to believe it's due to something Microsoft has changed, as there are far too many people reporting similar and odd issues all of a sudden. This all started after the recent changes to the bookings homepage.
- This is the validation I've been looking for, I didn't think it had to do with the scale either!
I agree this is something that has been very recent.
Guenter_R This is an issue which seemingly affects the entire Bookings service. I discovered this back in fall 2023. It was not previously a problem as of the end of April 2023. I had opened a ticket with Microsoft support which led to many frustrating emails and eventually being told that the delay is by design...
I'm picking it back up this fall with another support ticket, expecting similar levels of frustration. If I've learned anything from reading the replies here, it's that I'm not crazy. What I have a real hard time understanding is how this has not blown up more than I've been able to discover. It's almost as if this doesn't affect the majority of Bookings users.
I do have limited use, implementing it for Parent-Teacher conferences 2-3 times per school year, but while it was working, it was fantastic and solved a huge pain point for our school admin staff. Fall 2023's regression was a killer.
Dean-Poirier
You may want to try this.
open your bookings page customer facing and add ?skipRedirect=1should look something like this: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/YOURBOOKINGPAGE.onmicrosoft.com/bookings/?skipRedirect=1
and compare the available timeslots with the normal url. For us the url with ?skipRedirect=1 not only loads the timeslots significantly faster it also shows only the correct available slots.
Not sure what the implications are for using the ?skipRedirect=1 but we have been for sometime now and haven't experienced any issues.- Interesting... It seems to work until an end user wants to book a second appointment out of the built-in flow. As soon as they hit the New Booking button, it rolls back to the default url. In our case, this will be less effective.
