Forum Discussion
Group Bookings in MS Bookings
I have a requirement to create a sign-up sheet for an event which comprises several different time slots, and for each slot there is a max of 50 attendees. I have used the Bookings app in the past for event sign-ups, although not with so many attendees. According to this page I can do group bookings by setting the "Maximum number of attendees per event" for a service. However, when I enter any number in the Maximum Attendees field and select "Save", that number is not retained - i.e. when I revisit that Service page, the field is empty, and I am unable to make more than one booking for that Service at any one time. Where am I going wrong?
Russ Thomson I see the option, it lets me set it to something other than 1 and it saves fine, however, it still only allows one person to pick that time slot to book it. Additional participants/customers have to be sent an invitation from the Bookings site owner. What is the possible use case for this?
Kreera_House my system has now caught up with yours and I can create a multi person event. However, as you mentioned, the functionality is really restricted. I find myself asking myself the same question. What possible use is this? Have you got any further? My expectation had been to publish an internal training session that staff members could book themselves on to. This was based on the description given:
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"Group bookings lets you to set up service appointments where multiple people can join a session with a single staff member. You can use group bookings to schedule conferences, lectures or training sessions with several people at the same time." - Define your Service Offerings in Microsoft Bookings
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So far I'm a little underwhelmed
philmaynard my functionality has changed since I made this post - rather than entering a value in the max attendees field and it not saving, the field is now greyed out with a default value of 1. I'll create a ticket with MS. I'm also curious to know, if this worked and I had say 25 attendees, how I would retrieve those 25 names - in the past when I've created a Booking for an event with multiple slots and say 5 attendees max/ slot (using 5x staff members for a service), the attendee names have had to be retrieved from the calendar view, which really is not ideal/ something customers complain about.
Me, too, have the same issue. Maximum number of attendees value not being saved.
Hi Russ Thomson Thanks for posting here. I'm experiencing the same issue too - very annoying! Has anyone contacts Microsoft Support yet in this? Hopefully it's just a temporary glitch as they're rolling it out.
Russ Thomson I have Office365 Business Premium but don't see this multiple bookings feature. Do you have a different version? From what I read online, this version I have should support multiple booking functionality.
Laurenceeast Per this information https://support.office.com/en-us/article/define-your-service-offerings-in-microsoft-bookings-4a1c391e-524f-48e0-bef8-185df3a9634b, the feature is still rolling out and may just not have reached your tenant yet.
- works if you make a new service. Does not work for me if i edit a service that was a single attendee at the beginning...hope this helps
- Correct and thanks. We create the 2 of them, one as 1-1 and eta other as a group option. We enable the one we need at the appropriate time.
Here's Microsoft's reply to why that advertised feature doesn't work:
Russ Thomson - Thanks for this.
Russ Thomson That doesn't match https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/define-your-service-offerings-in-microsoft-bookings-4a1c391e-524f-48e0-bef8-185df3a9634b where it states the feature is in the process of being rolled out, which means it's out of development:
Group bookings
Note: This feature is still rolling out and might not be available in your organization yet. For more info, check out When do I get the newest features in for Office 365?.
Kreera_House Thanks Kreera - my takeaway from this experience is that I can place little value on the information on MS sites.
Was this feature every made available? There is a field "Maximum number of attendees" but it is greyed out Russ Thomson
Hello 🙂 I was just wondering if anyone's got any further on the Group Booking feature? Having taken another look at the Group Bookings information on the Define your service offerings in Microsoft Bookings page, it looks like the group bookings are all handled manually from the bookings calendar rather then a self service page where people can register which is what I was expecting and hoping for.
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Once you've set up the appointment on your calendar, you can add users to the service and send them an email invite.Has anyone else been able to get the feature to work for them? If so, I'd love to hear how you're making it work for you 🙂
philmaynard I was able to make this work by creating a new service for the specific event and customizing "Availability" using a combination of the start and end date and custom hours. Then, when anyone picks that service, it will only show the date/time as available until all participant slots have been taken. It's not really intuitive to set up, but with the above tweaking, it worked to set it up as a self-service rather than me having to invite participants.
Kreera_House That's it! You've got it!!! Thank you do much, this was driving me crazy! I've tried so many combinations but this worked for me - at least as much as I can expect it too!!! It's still annoying that when you go to the page is doesn't automatically jump to the available day if it's scheduled within the next month. Still, it's almost there. For anyone who's interested, I've attached a long image of the options I tweaked to get mine to work following the advice from Kreera_House I've not tested it completely to there may be other tweaks to be made - especially around the online meeting settings and some of the messages sent out.
philmaynard if you do find out i would love to know as im trying to set up a virtual open day at the college and would like prospective learners to book into a Hair & Beauty live session with staff and pre created videos.
THanks Steve
philmaynardHi Phil - no: I abandoned this route as a potential solution. As of now, the Max Attendees box is greyed out for me.
Russ Thomson Phil Maynard - Thats a real shame it would have been great to use it to book the virtual open day slots with prospective learners . Back to the drawing board. Any suggestions just let me know , Big thanks steve
I got it working last week. Today it was working, then with a new Service it wasn't. Last week I also could change max. attendees. But not lower than 2. Today I couldn't edit max. attendees at all.
If Bookings were a salad, I'd throw it in the trash, with all the bugs it has.I want the good old Microsoft back, when they released a piece of software every 1-3 years with little to no bugs.
Radhika_Khetan_MSFTMicrosoft
DanielNiccoli Thanks for reaching out to us. Any service with maximum attendee as 1 is a single customer service and any service with maximum attendee as 2 or more is a multi customer service. As by design, we cannot convert single customer to multi customer or vice versa. Hence we cannot edit and save a number less than 2. You can create a new service for such scenario. Thanks for your interest in Bookings.
This "as by design" is not good design without AMPLE documentation to clarify this.
It's not intuitive and for this to be a tool aimed at small/medium businesses without extensive IT departments or folks with lots of free time to dig through threads - and wait for replies - it can very easily be a deal-breaker as there are other "booking" tools out there that are 100% free and more user friendly. Frankly, it's the Teams/O365 integration that's keeping my experiment going.
Russ Thomson
Do you know if you can use buffer time with group bookings? It won't work for me, I have a service for 50 students, but if I enable buffer time, only one person can book the 'service' for that hour.
Any thoughts on this?Thank you.
