Microsoft Bookings for Office 365

[Paul Nienow]

Just tried out bookings and this is a great product, but it seems that the integration with Office 365/Outlook is not working correctly?  If a user already has an appointment on their Outlook calendar, Bookings is not restricting this time from being booked using Bookings.  In otherwords, it seems like the Bookings calendar and a user's Outlook calendar are totally separate.  If an appointment is booked using Bookings, it does get that appointment onto a user's Outlook calendar, and then that time slot is not available to be booked, but like I said, if a user has another appointment on thier Outlook calendar that they booked themselves, this does not restrict someone from booking with them.

I use calendly.com which integrates perfectly with Office 365 in this manner, and am not sure why this native Microsoft app does not work that way?

[#2]

All I can say is 'working as designed'. Bookings does not do a free/busy lookup to Exchange Online and maintains it's own set of available hours when staff can be booked. It's not really designed for people running a full Office 365 setup where they sit at a desk managing their own calendar. It's really designed for people like Pet Groomers who might have an owner/manager with Office 365 (hence why it does allow the creation of appointments also directly into Calendar) but the majority of the booked staff are grooming animals all day and would manage their schedule fully within the Bookings app. I understand why you think this is sub-optimal compared to calend.ly. I had to read through the product specs again myself. It would be interesting to see if it has been architected to be outside your Office 365 tenant without access to your free/busy lookup, for security reasons (guessing). Does calend.ly do the integration by providing your Office 365 authentication details to that service?

[#3]

Thanks.  I agree it seems like it is designed for the pet grooming office, but it would be really useful if it could also be used like Calendly.  If there was an option to allow checking availability on a user's Office 365 calendar.  And yes, Calendly does this seemlessly/flawlessly, based on providing Office 365 credentials.

[#4]

Hello!

Can you tell me how to try Microsoft Bookings?

I have tried in our production tenant and opening trial - and I haven't any success to find Bookings!

Thank you!

Best,

Tom

[#5]

Hi Paul,
I completely agree with you. It could be nice to have the option to take into account user's Office 365 calendar availability.
Hope it will come soon ! :)

[#6]

The integration of Bookings with your personal Office 365 calendar is live now and should be available to use in both web and the app. Please give it a try and let us know of any feedback.

[#7]

Still not working. Integration does not honor the Free/Busy of the assigned staff.

Are we missing something?