How to use Bookings to allow external users to pick a webinar to attend

[BrianRMI]

I'm working on moving a company from Zoom to MS Teams. One feature of Zoom they use is the ability to provide external uses the ability to pick from a list of scheduled webinars to join. See attached for an example of what I need to replicate. I tried creating a shared Booking page to do this, but can't quite get what I want. Is that possible with Bookings and if so, could you please help me by listing the steps? Thank you in advance!

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@BrianRMI 

Funnily enough I am just setting up something similar.

The first thing to say is bookings is about booking in an appointment when staff members are free to have that appointment not about booking into an existing session.  So you have to be a bit creative.

1. Create a service with the webinar title and set the length (example it might last 3 hours)
2. Make sure you set it to more than 1 attendee before you save it
3. Add one staff member that is going to do the webinar series
4. Availability options - general availability = not available
5. Set different availability for a date range - choose the date you want to hold the webinar and set available when staff member is free
6. Use the booking page to book the webinar at the time you want the webinar to start (book for a not real person!)
7. Look on the booking page to see what times are left (example I booked one at 10 am so as its 3 hours long you cant book one before 10am and the next free slot is 1pm)
8. Go to the calendar view of the booking page and give the staff member some time off that covers this (in my example I could give him 1pm to 5pm as time off and then the other times would vanish from the booking page).
9. Repeat steps 5-7 for each webinar session you want to run

If you only have a single webinar each day and its always at the same time you can avoid having to give time off by setting buffer time so once you have chosen the time all the rest vanish (but this does leave you at the mercy of the person running the webinar saying - oh can we start late on week X)

[#3]

Thank you for your reply, JGliddon!! I can see you the process you mentioned could work and I appreciate the insights. For now I've decided to use Teams Webinar to create events for each date/time for our webinar and in the email invitations we send out we'll list each date/time option and embed the respective Teams Webinar URL in the line time. For example:

May 20, 9am-11am: Click HERE to register
May 21, 1pm - 3pm: Click HERE to register
Etc...