How can I disable user access to Microsoft Booking while still allowing Outlook Book with Me

[JonKilner]

Monitoring Azure AD, we noticed getting lots of random Azure AD user account created with things like Bob test, bob test 2, just testing, Jons Page, Jons page 1, JonK page, etc (you get the idea).

When looking further into this, we see that these accounts are Scheduling Mailboxes and are being created when users create shared calendars though the Microsoft Bookings app.

We all know what users are like and I'm keen to avoid the headache and mess we had with Teams sprawl, when everyone was able to create Teams and you ended up with lots of garbage that needed to be managed.

I'd like for only a small group of users to have access to Bookings, while allowing all users to have access to Outlook Book with Me (which doesn't create additional Azure AD objects). For example, we have a group of users/departments that are looking to make use of the Bookings app to setup bookings pages for their departments.

I've read that we can manage this access be using an owa mailbox policy or through assigning/removing the Bookings license. However it appears that this also removes the user's ability to use Outlook book with Me.

Is there a way to provide everyone with access to Outlook Book with Me, while restricting Microsoft Bookings to a small group of users?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

You should be able to use OWA Mailbox Policy "BookingsMailboxCreationEnabled" to limit the creation of Bookings sites. This still allows for the user's personal Bookings calendar to be used. They just can't create new sites.

[#3]

Thanks for the reply.
Have you confirmed this as being correct? I'm just about to start implementing the policy to confirm, but wondered if you'd already done this?

All the online articles I've read implied that both Outlook Book With Me and MS Bookings were managed through the same owa policy setting you mentioned.

[#4]

I have confirmed this, yes. Now I did have the policy in place before Bookings With Me came out, so maybe I was "grandfathered in" in a way. But with the policy in place, when I enable Bookings for a user, their own Bookings With Me is generated in OWA.