Jun 16 2020 03:37 AM
This week our live bookings calendar has stopped displaying booking data on the front page (it just says NA). When downloading booking data as TSV file, the file is completely empty. We need this to start working again asap as we will be taking booking tomorrow and need the print out for this weekend. I have tried querying the calender via Microsoft Graph, it is showing null for customer info:
"selfServiceAppointmentId": "4eb10cba-04bf-4871-a45b-d3c3638658f1",
"customerId": null,
"customerName": null,
"customerEmailAddress": null,
"customerPhone": null,
"customerNotes": null,
It appears to be working OK for other calendars, but this one seems to be broken.
How can it be fixed / what is the problem?
Thanks
Alan
Jun 16 2020 03:46 PM
@ercwebdev our organization is also having this issue as of an hour or so ago. Our Board of Directors approved MS Bookings as our application to manage facility use within COVID-19 guidelines, and this sudden missing data is a HUGE problem.
We are not using Microsoft Graph, I'm not even sure if our organization has access (we use 365 Business Standard), and we don't have a public facing calendar through Bookings, but we've been heavily relying on the exported TSV file, and as of today it is blank upon exporting. Just yesterday it exported everything just fine. Our dashboard also shows "NA" just like @ercwebdev's screenshot.
Any assistance with getting the data back into that TSV would be greatly appreciated.
Jun 17 2020 02:01 AM
Hi there,
I raised this as a support ticket with MS through O365 and had a few phone calls with an 'O365 Ambassador'. He didn't have any answers, just said it looked like the data had become corrupted?? His solution was just to create a new calendar. So this is an operation issue with MS, but no answers or solutions.
Thanks
Alan
Jun 17 2020 11:01 AM
@ercwebdevThen how all of my bookings are still present in the backend calendar? More a question for MS and other readers; Thank you for taking the time to reach out to MS and report back here.
In our situation, people are able to make bookings on the public/published bookings page, and they all appear in the calendar just fine, it's only the homepage-dashboard and that TSV file that are having an issue.
Is the idea that if I were to start a new calendar and reschedule all the appointments from the prior calendar, the TSV file would export properly on the new calendar? And what's to prevent this from happening again, Microsoft?
Our board of directors would already like to switch from Office 365 to G-Suite, and this is not helping my case.
Jun 30 2020 02:18 AM
We have ditched it and went with another supplier. Not a good product, it was taking double, triple bookings for slots and resulted in over bookings (https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_o365admin-mso_other-mso_o365b/overbookin...)
This perhaps might have been the reason why the dashboard and TSV file were empty. Seems it can't handle volume. Also no one from Microsoft seems bothered. I reported it to MS and spoke to a help person, they don't even have a communication channel to report this kind of stuff back to the developers. Very disappointing.
Jun 30 2020 08:17 AM
@ercwebdevThank you for your follow-up. I am sorry to hear the direction this has gone for your organization.
I also ended up reaching an O365 Ambassador and spoke with his supervisor, both of whom took the time to remote in and take a look at my situation. Ultimately, it was suggested that if I unpublish the calendar and then republish it, which would kind of refresh it and make the TSV file contain data again.
The only problem being the risk of losing our current bookings, of which we have many, so a secondary option was to create a new calendar, which we have opted for as we don't want to risk losing the appointments. It's a super long process of recording our current appointments in Excel and then manually adding them back to the new calendar in Bookings.
They did suggest using PowerShell to export a list of our current bookings, but couldn't give me any commands to enter per Microsoft's policy (not allowed to suggest PowerShell scripts/commands/etc). And unfortunately I am too unskilled in PS, and on too much of a deadline to give that a go safely.
Mind if I ask which booking solution you ended up utilizing?
Jun 30 2020 10:31 AM
@OVA-CJ Once you got it all copied over did you find that un-publishing and republishing resolved the TSV issue? (We have it with a few of our bookings calendars).
As per saving the data, if you open Microsoft excel and go to the Data Tab, I did find that I can connect to the "Microsoft Exchange" data source for that e-mail address and download all of the sent messages. The data attached to that excel download when worked with properly can reveal all the appointment data from the calendar. You will have to have appropriate permissions to that exchange account, but i'm assuming as a tenant administrator you have those permissions.
Jun 30 2020 11:52 AM
Hello @AdelineCampbell, thank you for your reply. I have not finished copying the events over yet, my deadline is Friday with hopes to finish sooner, but I'll report back here once I'm finished to let you know how the unpublishing/republishing works out.
Thank you very much in regards to the Excel data source tip, I will give that a try soon, could potentially save me a TON of time. The associated calendar is a resource calendar, meaning it does not have an Exchange license associated with it, but I don't think that should limit anything you've recommended. Thank you again, I am looking forward to trying this out.
Jun 30 2020 11:57 AM
@OVA-CJ - Here is a screenshot of the power-query view before I begin drilling down into the data. (I used the e-mail address that's embedded in the "bookings" url as address for the exchange data connection). Expanding the meeting requests table after creating the connection allows you to explore the data. Best luck!
Jul 16 2020 07:01 AM
Hi OVA,
The bookings system we used is an offering from the company who supply our CMS, which I'm not at liberty to discuss. Sorry about that! This week I have been trying to use Bookings to set up another booking calendar for internal use and experiencing some issues. Buts that's another story.
Thanks,
ercwebdev