Custom Questions and Admin Controls Come to Microsoft Bookings
Published Sep 20 2017 09:33 AM 32K Views
Microsoft

We're adding two new features to Bookings that make it easier for users to schedule and manage appointments. These highly requested updates allow you to request key information you need to better deliver your services and have better control over who uses Bookings in your organization.

 

  • Custom questions - You can now add custom questions to your booking page to collect the information you need. You can also choose which fields are required and which are optional on your booking page.
  • Admin controls - You can now turn off Bookings for your entire organization and grant or remove access to Bookings to individual users in your organization.

Custom questions is rollling-out to existing Bookings customers and administrator controls will start to show-up in the Office 365 admin center in the coming months. Every Office 365 Business Premium subscription will get these new features in the coming months.

 

Custom questions

Use custom fields to request the specific information that you need from your customer, and to control what fields are required or optional to complete a booking.

To manage custom fields create or edit a service in the Services tab and look for "Custom Fields" on the Service details page. Click "Modify" to open a side panel that you can use to add custom questions, select which questions appear on your booking page for specific services, and to make a question a required field.

 

Customize or add the fields that appear.png

 

Customize or add the fields that appear and select which ones are required.

 

Notice that the set-up page shows two distinct sections; customer information and custom fields.

 

The "Customer information" piece shows the "default" fields that Bookings provides. Questions highlighted in blue will appear in your booking page. Questions that are not highlighted will not be seen by your customers. 

"Custom fields" can be added and removed, shown or hidden, to fit your specific requirements for a given service you offer.  

 

Checking the "required" tick box for any field will require customers to give you specific information before they can complete their booking. Your customer's name will always be a required field. You can now decide which other fields are optional and/or hidden. Bookings now allows you to hide or show the "Customer email" field. Note that if you don't collect a customer email address, Bookings won't be able to send booking confirmations or email reminders and your customer won't be able to reschedule online later.

 

After you save and publish your Bookings page, it will be ready to use.

 

Provide additional inform.png

Request the information your business needs.

 

Notice that the custom questions you create appear in the bottom of your page in the "Provide additional information" section.

 

You can learn more about custom questions here.

 

Admin controls lets you turn on/off Bookings at the tenant or user level

 

Bookings will soon allow you, as an Office 365 admin, to turn off Bookings for your entire organization or to assign or remove licenses for Bookings at the user level, giving you more control over who can create and publish booking pages, who can use the Bookings mobile apps, and who can see all of the appointments on your booking calendars.

 

You can find the admin controls for Bookings in the Office 365 admin center. This support article explains how to use them.

 

With custom questions and admin controls we are adding two highly requested features to Bookings so you have more reasons to make it your business's complete appointment management tool.  

 

Your feedback matters to us. Help us provide more of the features and functionality you need by providing feedback on our UserVoice page.

 

The Bookings team.

 

FAQs

 

 Q. Where do I learn more about custom fields?

 A.  This support article will help you get started.

 

Q. Where do I learn more about admin controls for Bookings

A.  This support article will help you get started.

15 Comments
Copper Contributor

When doe the day come that the developer of Microsoft startt to understasnd that there is more then only the US.

when finally start to respect the local settings and the local time and date formats.

 

 

Copper Contributor

Thanks - this is a great improvement. However, the customer details don't make it into the Calendar event that's created from the Booking. That means the extra customer details are pretty much inaccessible... i.e. if I'm reviewing my calendar on my phone, I won't see what a particular booking is about (unless I then log into the particular Bookings site used to book that particular event... which is not easy).

Copper Contributor

I was just looking for this, Thanks very much!   

BTW, can I also customise the text on top of customer's note field?    Which read " Please let us know if you have any special request.  Thank you".

Currently I can hide that field and adding custom text field on bottom just like illustrated in this article.

 

However, when customer landed on booking page at fist time without selecting service they also see default filed for "your details" area.    

It will change accordingly when the desired service is selected.  I wish this "customer detail" area is entirely hidden until customer select the service form list.   It give more clean and less confusing experience to customer.  

 

Overall, it is very nice application and we are trying to use as resource ( meeting room hire ) booking system.  

 

Thanks,

 

Copper Contributor

Glad to see custom fields added, thank you.  Does booking allow us to pass values through the URL to autofill fields and custom fields?

Copper Contributor

I don't see the point of capturing data in custom fields without being able to report on it or access it.  Ideally adding it to both the calendar appt as well as the export file (.tsv file).

Copper Contributor

Is there anyway to export the information in the custom fields?  I am trying to use this for a sign-up and don't want to have to extract that information by hand.

Copper Contributor

Can we confirm that security mechanisms meetings go through from the meeting being committed and arriving as a invite within the internal users calendar?

i can add malicious URLs to the notes field and nothing is picked up by ATP safelinks etc.

 

Copper Contributor

Why is there a limit of 65 staff members for a single calendar?  I need a much larger limit. 

Brass Contributor

In case you still need a solution @Clogh320 and @k_ries1515   I was able to extract custom field data successfully using Power Automate, but only for single customer services.

 

Flow Description

This flow runs nightly and parses user data from events located in a generic Outlook account calendar (this account is being used by the Bookings app to schedule appointments) then creates a CSV file stored in a Shared Documents team library. Attached are the details of my solution.
Bookings event details to CSV file using Power Automate.docx

 

Hope this helps!
~Kimberly

Copper Contributor

Dear

 

I need to hide the "Name" field in the booking page. Could you help how to do so?

Thanks in advance

Microsoft

@KarimRyan I am sorry to say, there is no way to deselect the "Name" field from the required information.

Gabo_0-1631552116049.png

 

Copper Contributor

Thank Gabo for your answer. Is it possible at least to modify the field: Name => Store name?

Because only "Name" is not explicit.

 

Thanks 

Copper Contributor

Any update please?

 

Brass Contributor

@KarimRyan No, unfortunately, these field names cannot be changed.

Copper Contributor

Hello, Not sure if this is the correct forum to ask this question, please direct if it is not.

 

When booking an appointment a client may see the following message: 

Julie2022_0-1654178837349.png

Can I customize to remove "or person"?

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