Announcement: Bring in business 24/7 with Microsoft Bookings

[Lana O'Brien]

To help make appointment scheduling simpler and more efficient for you, your staff and your customers, Microsoft is introducing a new Office 365 service called Microsoft Bookings!

Customers can schedule your business directly online

Reduce missed appointments with confirmations and reminders

Make it easy for your customers to reschedule or cancel bookings

Manage bookings and customer information from anywhere

Automatically add bookings on staff calendars

Bookings is now rolling out in First Release to customers who subscribe to the Office 365 Business Premium plan and will roll out to all Business Premium customers worldwide in the coming months. Read more of Office Blogs. 

[#2]

No there is not, at least for now

[#3]

Hi
For UK users will the data be stored within the EU (Dublin or Amsterdam) or will it be US based?

[#4]

This is something I would like also to know :)

[#5]

@Lana O'Brien could you please share the question about where bookings data is stored with the team?

[#6]

I have Office 365 Business Premium tenant but I can find Microsoft Booking on the Office 365 Launch Bar.

Does anybody know when Micrisift Bookings sitll be available?

[#7]

That's great news. E3 and using Timetrade and we'd love an intergrated solution!

[#8]

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@Tomislav Bronzin wrote:

I have Office 365 Business Premium tenant but I can find Microsoft Booking on the Office 365 Launch Bar.

Does anybody know when Micrisift Bookings sitll be available?

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Are you on First Release? Those will be the ones to get it first.

After that no one really knows how long it will take to roll out to the rest, it could be many months unfortunately.

[#9]

Bookings is more designed for customers to make an appointment with a services provider. The dog groomer is a good example. There are some good third-party Cloud solutions for this in the market but none so far made by Microsoft. This helps Microsoft capture a need of the small businesses that chosen to power their businesses with Office 365.

From an SMB perspective the downside I can see is lack of financial integration. Most other appointment booking solutions via the web include invoicing and then integraton with financial products like Xero. In the age of automation, I'm double-handling if I have to handle customer bookings in one system but invoice them in another. Of course this depends on the circumstances of the business and the service, but it's a good reason why I might choose something else instead of Microsoft Bookings.

For Enterprise people and their external contacts, I guess the closest you get outside of your solution is the FIndTime or Boomerang add-ons to Outlook?

-Sonia 

[#10]

I have a small business, cleaning services, and have been using SharePoint Calendars for years now. I have workflows that trigger when a employee clicks custom fields off on relations to the job.
My question is, will there be anyway that this service will work with SharePoint?

[#11]

Yes, we have First Release turned on on several tenants that we administrate, but we can't see Bookings :(

[#12]

I've found out why some of us can't see Bookings yet: there has been a critical piece of info missing from this thread - it's only available in the US and Canada so far. So, everyone else (including me) stop looking! I wonder when the rest of the roll-out will take place??

[#13]

Have you tried to open US tenant account?

[#14]

The roll out to the rest of the world is now complete - please give it a try and let us know if you have any feedback.

Thanks!

[#15]

Do we have status for E3?

[#16]

Very Good!! We are waiting for it to come to E3 and E5

[#17]

I know this reply is 2.5 years later @Chandresh Jain but just re-reading the thread and thought I'd close the loop. I had a conference call with a couple of you back in 2017 to talk through some of the differences between bookings and calendly. I still use calendly or my HubSpot calendar as Bookings doesn't really do the same thing. Bookings is great is your a hairdresser or dog washer (as per the examples here) whereas calendly allows people to book a meeting with me that I can then modify (I can add an address, add people, in fact, everything you can do with a regular Outlook calendar entry). 

I think they are two completely separate products - one is for people booking a service and the other is for people booking meetings. And as it turns out, we have very different scheduling needs. 

If a Microsoft product ever turns up that is as easy to use, and reliable (Cortana is not quite there yet), then I will make the shift. For now, I live by my calendly link. 

[#18]

@Lana O'BrienAwesome. Great stuff

[#19]

Is there any plan to role this out to GCC tenants?