Book meetings for external users and have a limited amount of slots availible?

[Oskar Kuus]

Hi!

We work allot in O365 and specially in Teams.
I really lack some kind of option to setup an invite for personal meetings with clients. I know i have the options to send them a mail/meeting in Outlook and hope they approve of that time.
But when i have 30 clients and i want to say to them all that i am availble on these 30 timeslots, first one to pick gets the time they want.

How can i setup this in O365?

I have looked at Bookings, cant figure out if this is possible.

I have looked in sharepoint to build some kind of public solution but it seems i can not find a way to only let one person book one timeslot.

I have looked at Forms, but again it is the same problem... multiple clients can select the same timeslot.

So now i do not know how to find a solution.

I can always venture outside of O365 and look at services like Doodle.

But id like to keep to O365 if possible.

This is a problem for me but i am also investigating this for hundres of colleges in my company that also want this. A simple solution to send out 30 timeslots and let clients pick one and then that one gets marked as "taken".

Any ideas of how i can do this?

[#2]

There really isn't anything built into O365 for this. You'll need to look 3rd party for that. FindTime is good for finding a time between people, but for booking out your time you're best bet is to look 3rd party such as Calendly.com etc.

[#3]

It does sound like the sort of thing that Bookings would work for - but as Chris mentioned, Calendly.com is a 3rd party alternative.

[#4]

To bad that i cant get this in o365.
A 3rd party solution is not really an option for me.
I had big hopes for Microsoft bookings but it aint flexible enoug to make it work for our needs.

For example we have 200 teachers that need to book meetings with parents. So it must be managed by each teacher. Setup timeslots, send out and let parents pick one time and it gets marked as taken/unavailable.

I guess the will have to do it manually instead.
Hopefully this will come in the future.

[#5]

@Oskar Kuus I agree this would be very useful. Organisations have to be able to turn to the outside world. If they spent the whole time talking to themselves, they get in trouble. My focus is on constituents. It's now 2023, has the 2019 position been upgraded?

[#6]

@Oskar Kuus Bookings by microsoft seems to do exactly that. You can create a new shared calendar and publish it on the internet as a self service page, which is synchronized to your calendar. The external user can see time slots and book a slot based on your availability. If you need specific slots to be visible in the calendar, you could add blockers in your calendar.