Can Bookings be used for booking equipment?

Iron Contributor

We are looking for a solution that can be used by employees to book equipment. Can Bookings be used for that? As there will be hundreds of items for booking, it would require a way to bulk add equipment e.g. by using Powershell and a CSV file.

8 Replies

@Jakob Rohde I added equipment as "staff" and employees are booking as customers.  I don't know about bulk uploads, but this seems to work for booking equipment. I added services for different lengths of time so they can book for 2-12 hours.  A little more cumbersome than a calendar, but I think this way I can export number of hours per equipment to track usage for the year. 

@caron91 

 

I tried that as well, but as far as I understand you need always to have a (unique) email adress for the "Staff". Most likely a work-around would be creating a resource account for each equipment, but that seems a bit to cumbersome to create and maintain.

Anyone with a good trick on how to solve this?

@John Hansen another problem I have run into is that the Admin is set up as staff by default, and gets an email for every booking that is automatically accepted as a calendar invite.  I can't figure out how to disable that and it's driving me crazy, so I would love to hear what solutions you find.

 

@caron91 change the "Send customer replies to" email on the Business Information section.

@ra274 thank you, this was the solution to my problems!

@Jakob Rohde  We used Bookings for equipment calendars but now 8 months later we have a problem. Bookings do not identify appointments made from outlook, we cant't check the box "Events on personal calendar affect availability" on staff that are equipment. This means that we can book the equipment from outlook and bookings at the same time.

It works fine on a person or a room. Maybe this is an unusual problem, i don't know but check it out if it works in your enviorment. 

@Victoraj4 I also miss the option to "Events on personal calendar affect availability" - do you know why or how did you get around it?

Hi @JonBjo !
We converted the equipment mailbox to a room. I don't remember if we converted it to a user first and then a room. But this link was helpful. 
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/recipients-in-exchange-online/manage-user-mailboxes/conver...

After it was converted to a room calendar, we had to remove the staff in bookings and add it again as staff and the to the services. This was not a pleasant journey because we had to assign every appointment that existed in the booking page to the staff manually.
 
It can be good to know that when you add the staff again on an appointment, the staff might look occupied. But it's the appointment before you converted it, that's still there. There is no problem to add the appointment to de staff anyway, the double-booking will be updated to one after 24h.   

I hope this is helpfull and my english make sense !