Hi Everyone,
Have found an awesome solution to having multiple staff members with external email addresses ALL automatically assigned to a booking and notified via email at the time of the booking. You can use this solution for internal addresses as well.
It uses a distribution list as the only staff member assigned to a service, ensuring that staff member is always picked. When that service is selected by the client, ALL the staff members in the distribution list are notified automatically.
- Create a Distribution Group in Microsoft 365 Admin Center
- Groups > Add a group
- Create a Distribution Group Email Address name@yourdomain.com
- (This can take up to 60 minutes for the new group to be created and editable)
- Add External Email Addresses in Exchange Admin Center
- Recipients > Contacts
- Add > Mail Contact
- Enter the external email address details for your staff members
- Add External Emails to Distribution List in Exchange Admin Center
- Groups > Recipients
- Double-click the newly created distribution list
- Membership > Add Members
- Select the external email addresses from the Contact list & add to distribution list
- Create Staff in Bookings Admin
- Staff > Add Staff
- Enter staff details using distribution list email address name@yourdomain.com
- Assign Staff to Services in Bookings Admin
- Services > Manage Services
- Select Service to assign staff
- Select only the staff member with the distribution list associated email address and no other staff members
Say you have three staff members with external email addresses added to this distribution list.
Now when a booking is made for the service (assigned to the external distribution list Staff member) all three of three of these other staff members are automatically emailed with bookings calendar invite message.
If the booking is rescheduled or cancelled all three of the staff members get notified.
This only works well if you require all three of these staff members to always be present for a service to occur. If any one of them can't be available you will need to mark the distribution list associated staff member as having Time Off to stop the service being selected for certain dates.
This is a fantastic solution that works around the shortcomings where multiple staff are assigned to a service (three in this example) but when a client makes a booking, randomly only ONE of the staff members is selected and notified automatically. You then manually have to select the other two if you require all three staff to be notified.
Hoping in the future Bookings will allow an option to force all assigned staff members to a service to be available and notified when a booking is made, this is the preferred solution but for now this workaround achieves the same result.
Hope this helps anyone else with this need.
Alastair
