Guest Accounts, not bookable (Pending Approval) - Type of Inbox is the issue?

[Daniel_KAE]

My organisation uses Microsoft bookings for appointments across many centres who have their own inbox.

However, only some inboxes seem to be automatically accepted for bookings as guests.

It seems that the fault lies in the type of inbox used.

- Shared Inboxes are automatically accepted and available for bookings.

- Individual/Personal Inboxes are not and an approval email is sent, but there is no way for acceptance on the email itself when sent and remain unbookable, awaiting acceptance through an approval email.

This is frustrating for two reasons.

Firstly, even if we use another option to send an email to the inbox, unless you have direct access to the account login, you still cannot accept.

Secondly, this is preventing Bookings from being a very good efficient solution.  The app is perfect for our needs, but this situation is preventing full implementation.

[#2]

@Daniel_KAE If you add a user mailbox/account as a staff it will wait for the user to accept the membership before making them bookable. This is expected as the default option at the tenant level is to approve the membership before accepting appointments from Bookings calendars. If you don't want this behavior, you could disable this option from M365 admin center -> search for Bookings and under Bookings settings you can disable the option to accept membership. Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Babu

[#3]

This is good in practice.
But there are many users in businesses that do not have editing access to that area to change settings. (This includes myself.)

[#4]

My Organization is experiencing issues with the invitee accepting the invite but still not being Bookable. Clicking the link in the invitation email sends the new staff to a default MS Bookings landing page and not the target Bookings page. MS Support has said that this is a known bug without a scheduled remediation but I cannot find any specific documentation recognizing this bug.

[#5]

Hi Benjamin.
That sounds similar to something I tried to resolve my issue, which is to set the inbox account as a different type of user which does send the authorisation acceptance button in the email.
The problem I found with that is unless you have direct access to the account and are logged into that account in your default browser where the link opens, it will land them on their personal booking's page.
(In my case, it was myself accessing the inbox that needs to accept, but I don't have direct access to the account.)
And as such, the authorisation doesn't get completed, because it doesn't land on the correct account's booking page.

Something I seem to remember as well from when I first started using the app, which I think may be what you mean.
If the person is logged in on the correct account is that they would need to accept the invitation using the three dots on the landing page, and that will cause their authorisation to be accepted.

I don't know if this is similar to your experience though.