So, I spent several hours trying to get Business Bookings to meet my small service business needs today, and it would seem to have turned into wasted time (other than now getting that Bookings isn't the tool I need it to be).
The good:
It has inside access to calendars in my organization (including mine), and can update the calendar in real time.
It's something I already have - no user account required because I already have it.
Inherently just one calendar to deal with
Most basic functionality is there
The not so good:
Lack of ability to apply any styling beyond the basic color scheme
- Doesn't seem to take into account transparency in logos - instead creating a blue background in the transparency areas regardless of the rest of the color scheme.
- No ability to place a custom redirect - customers functionally come to a dead-end with options only for things like canceling the appointment they just made or managing it. This functionally ignores the embed model, as there is no real custom follow-up available.
- No domain awareness - not even my MS hosted domain. If not embedded in a page, they get a URL that tells them far more than they need to do and clearly exposes the external nature of it.
- The iframe-based embed struggles to play nice with WordPress-based websites. Some have managed to get it to work, but many, like me, have issues with frame sizing.
I would think that MS would have a goal of trying to keep as much within their ecosystem as possible, but this app, which strikes me as potentially very powerful for both large and small business, has the feel of minimalistic support. Searches I've done trying to resolve the issues I've had include a power where a user was told their pretty basic integration question should be taken over to a GitHub discussion (one that is locked without a GitHub login as it happens).
Perhaps I've just missed a ton of things about this, but it's pretty frustrating that something with so much potential seems to be lacking some fundamental ideas for integration scenarios. Ironically, it will also likely delay if not eliminate any notion I had of moving to Teams instead of my current teleconference provider.
