Microsoft Bookings as you all know is an appointment scheduling software. A lot of customers use Microsoft Bookings for use cases such as connecting with sales leads, having virtual appointments with doctors, connecting with candidates for recruitment, appointments with tech-support among others. However, some of our customers have used it very creatively for reservations and as a ticketing system. In this blog, we will highlight some of these incredible scenarios, Bookings customers have achieved. We will also walk you through on how to configure for those use cases.
Using Microsoft Bookings to reserve a parking space.
We recently came across a customer who used Microsoft Bookings to reserve parking spaces. The customer is working on a hybrid model and has limited parking spaces for employees. They have configured Microsoft Bookings to help their employees book parking spaces.
This is how one can do the same:
- Create parking spaces mailboxes in exchange. Follow the guidelines listed here - Create and manage room mailboxes | Microsoft Learn.
- Use these as staff members in Bookings. Just as you search for any person while you add the staff members, you can search for these parking spaces as well.
- Note that these are unlicensed mailboxes, and they will be added as “guest” by default.
Now you can create a service, called “Book your parking spaces” and all these staff-members (which represent the parking spaces) to it. The configuration depends on your scenarios. You can have different services for different locations.
Since, most employees will be agnostic to the parking spaces, the best way is to unselect the option “Allow customers to choose a particular staff for booking”.
Now your employees can come to the Bookings page and book parking spaces just like they would book an appointment with any staff member.
The employee can use the confirmation mail to display it at the parking that indeed they have reserved the parking space.
Using Microsoft Bookings to book a game room
One of the customers has a unique use case. They have a game room in which more than one person could attend at a time.
This can be configured in a similar fashion as the parking space. There will be one major difference. More than 1 person can be in the game room at a given time and there is just 1 room.
One can configure the game room on exchange as described in the scenario above. After that while adding the service, we should take note of the setting shown below.
The setting (Maximum number of attendees) indicates how many customers can attend the same appointment and avail the service. In this use-case, this number should be set to the capacity of the game room.
Using Microsoft Bookings as a tool to get “Passes”
One of our customers had a tie-up with a museum and a certain number of employees were allowed to visit the museum on the weekend. To achieve this use-case, the following was done.
The customer added a museum staff as a guest staff-member. As one knows, “guests” don’t need to be member of tenant.
The benefit of this is that the museum staff will receive emails about the visitor, and thus can keep track of the visitors from this company.
Since, in a particular slot, more than 1 person can visit, the setting “Maximum number of attendees” in the service should be set with the appropriate number.
Let us know in the comments about your own unique use cases of Bookings. A bit of creativity and perhaps some quirkiness has helped our customers solve unconventional problems using Bookings.