Editor's note (2/3/22): Removed a broken link to UserVoice and fixed a link to our Bookings customer stories that was taking people to a third-party site.
Editor's note (1/28/21): Title was updated to make it shorter
There is a growing need for virtual meetings, consults, and appointments but also an increase in the amount of time people are dedicating to try to schedule those appointments. Back and forth phone calls, emails, text messages. Bookings can make it easier, so you can spend more time talking to customers rather than trying to schedule them, and it does it in a secure and integrated way with Microsoft 365.
Microsoft Bookings helps making scheduling and managing appointments easy and seamless. It does this through a web-based booking tool where people have the flexibility to see and book services when it’s convenient for them, it makes it easier to manage staff’s time by integrating with Outlook’s calendar and keeps everyone updated with timely and automatic email confirmations and reminders to reduce no-shows, all these also helps organizations reduce repetitive scheduling tasks.
Bookings is flexible, customizable, secure as it uses a mailbox in Exchange Online, and can be designed to fit scenarios and needs of different parts of an organization.
We have worked with various industries to enable different scenarios. Tele-Health by virtual consultations with doctors through Microsoft Teams, educational classrooms, financial consulting, organizations internal services like legal/IT/HR provided to their employees, candidate interviews, assisted shopping in retail, and government services. To read more on how customers are using Bookings for these scenarios, please click here.
These scenarios demand high scale, to help make sure Bookings works well for you and scale to your needs, we have prepared these best practices.
1. Planning for scale
Each Bookings calendar is currently designed to handle a maximum of 2,500 bookings across all services in that calendar per day, along with a creation limit of 10 booking requests per second, this will work for common scenarios.
If your requirements exceed this, you should plan to distribute the load using the steps below.
2. Set how far in advance your customers can book an appointment
Finding the optimal value for the maximum advance appointment time your customers can book can help prioritize the daily limits for appointments that are closer to “today”. We have attached a simple Excel spreadsheet where you can enter the values to help you estimate the number of appointments and forward-looking time you can have in your Bookings calendar.
Follow the instructions below to use the attached spreadsheet.
If you got confused (don’t worry, we did too), below is an example. This example is calculated at the calendar level, not at the service level.
We are actively working to increase the scaling limits as you read this and we will post a new communication as soon as our systems are updated.
Thank you!
Gabriel on behalf of the Bookings team
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