Help with intermittent staff availability in Microsoft Booking
Hi everyone, I manage a team of volunteers who provide counseling across ~12 sites. Most of our sites have one counselor, but one site (phone counseling) has 10 counselors with varying availability. Our challenge is that Microsoft Bookings only seems to allow recurring staff availability on a weekly pattern (e.g., every Tuesday 9am–2pm). Many of our counselors work on patterns like “2nd and 4th Tuesday” or “1st and 3rd Tuesday.” Currently, our workaround is to enter recurring weekly availability and then block off the “off” weeks in Outlook calendars. This works, but it gets messy when a counselor wants to make a one-time schedule change (e.g., start an hour later on a specific date or add a non-typical counseling date). We have to manually cross-check other counselors’ availability to avoid conflicts and make sure incorrect appointments do not populate, which is error-prone and stressful. My questions: Is there a way in Bookings to set staff availability on intermittent patterns (e.g., 2nd/4th Tuesday) without relying on Outlook blocks? Is there any way to make one-time availability exceptions for a specific date and staff member? Has anyone else managed multiple staff on a rotating schedule and found a clean workflow? Any guidance, workarounds, or confirmation that this is a current limitation would be very helpful. Thanks in advance!Create bookingStaffMember also requires Add-MailboxPermission
I created an Entra application with the required Graph permissions to manage Bookings scheduling mailboxes so that I could update the staffing for a Bookings page that I'm not a staff member of. Using that application to request a Microsoft Graph access token, meant I had the required permissions to add a user account (that already had a Bookings license) as an "administrator" (role) for a Bookings page (Bookings business), to replace another person who was the previous Bookings page administrator, but who had since left. I used https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/bookingbusiness-post-staffmembers?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=powershell to do this. For the record, I was not able to do this using https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.graph.bookings/new-mgbookingbusinessstaffmember?view=graph-powershell-1.0 using Microsoft.Graph.Bookings module version 2.30.0, presumably because I am not a staff member with the Bookings "administrator" role for that particular Bookings page. However, the newly added user could not access that Bookings page at https://outlook.office.com/bookings/homepage until a further step had been completed (Error: "You don't have access to this booking page" shows instead). To ensure the new Bookings page administrator could access the Bookings page, I needed to add mailbox permissions, which I used https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchangepowershell/add-mailboxpermission?view=exchange-ps for. I found that giving the new Bookings page administrator full access to the scheduling mailbox ensured they could access the Bookings page. Example using ExchangeOnlineManagement PowerShell module: Add-MailboxPermission -Identity email address removed for privacy reasons -User email address removed for privacy reasons -AccessRights FullAccess If there is a more efficient way for an system admin to add new staff to a Bookings page, please let me know - otherwise, hopefully this helps someone who gets stuck 😊Bookings personal page shows incorrect times, not my "regular working hours" from settings
I'm trying to have my personal bookings page only show availabilities to book a meeting within my "regular working hours" as I have set in the settings: For each meeting type, I have explicitly set the availability to correspond to the previously set "regular working hours": However, the options to book on my personal page show availability for times that are not part of the set hours: Why are my available booking slots not corresponding to my set hours?
Disable Reschedule Broken
The ability to disable the reschedule feature for the person receiving the invite seems to be broken. I deselected the radio button (seen in my screenshot) in the service and saved changes. But when I test it, the email notification still provides me the ability to reschedule or cancel the appointment. In our organization, these appointments are time sensitive and legally cannot happen after a certain date, which varies for each person. We are managing over 200 appts per week, so it is not possible to do any sort of manual work around to ensure we catch unauthorized movement. In researching the issue, it looks like others have asked about the broken functionality, as seen in this 2024 post: Problem with the option to prevent customers managing their bookings | Microsoft Community Hub. But there has been no response. How do we get this issue on Microsoft's radar?
Using Bookings to register people for scheduled events?
Hi: I want to test if Bookings could be a good solution for this activity - or if there's a better way within 365. I will run six workshops in Zoom (scheduled via Outlook) next year. I want to send a communication to about 300 people from a range of organisations inviting them to sign up for any or all of these sessions. Probably be able to accommodate up to 200 people per session. Is it possible to use Bookings to have them sign up for the workshops, and get an invitation sent to them, AND have them added to our Outlook appointment attendees (so we know who they are)? If so... how?! If not, is there another MS365 product or feature that would enable this?
Cannot Make Changes to Staff
I started experiencing an error on our Bookings page yesterday, where I cannot make changes to the staff's availability. Everything appears to be working, but after adding a time slot or adjusting an existing time slot and selecting Save Changes, nothing has changed. The calendar does not display the new availability for that staff member, no changes are reflected when opening the up the same staff's availabiltity, and the time slot is not updating on the Bookings page. I have tried different browsers, cleared cookies/cache, tried to edit from another administrator's account, and waited a day to see if the changes persist. We have another booking page, which I am still able to make changes to. Has anyone experienced this issue?Setting schedule availability works differently from similar services
I've recently started using MS Bookings where previously I was using Calendly. There are two things calendly did really well that seem different or missing from Bookings. I want to raise here to find out if this functionality is not available or if I've just misunderstood how to do it. 1. Time increments and availability This is a weird one, Bookings seems to use the increments setting to also add a buffer at the beginning and end of the days bookable sessions. This feels weird to me. While there are settings that stop people booking in within say, 48 hours, what I'm looking for is a separate increments and buffer function. I've set my increments to 15mins, and with no calendar invite syncing that could be causing an issue, it adds the 15mins as a buffer to the beginning and end of the day's bookable times. For example, setting availability of 8:30am to 6:30pm I would expect to be able to book a session at 8:30am when availability starts, and the last session at 5:30pm, 1 hour before the end of the availability. However, Bookings shows 8:45am and 5:15pm and there doesn't seem to be a way to change this. Other services handled this sooo much better. This logic doesn't make sense to me - am I doing something wrong or has MS got the logic a bit wrong on this one? 2. I've seen mention of being able to have availability dictated by entries in the calendar of the linked staff account (provided you check the right box in settings). On other services, I could change a calendar event to 'Free' instead of busy, and this would then make those times available for someone to book over. This was really useful for syncing with my calendar and allowing some things to be booked over and others not by changing between 'Free' and 'Busy' status on each event. This doesn't seem to work - am I doing something wrong or is this feature missing? Thanks in advance!
Setting up 30-min meetings at quarter-past and quarter-to the hour
Hello All, I’m trying to set up 30 minute meetings that begin at quarter past and quarter to (e.g. 3:15, 3:45, 4:15 4:45…). In this case, I do not want the option of starting on the hour, or half hour. For some reason, Bookings with me doesn’t seem to allow this. Does anyone know how to do this? All the best, Alasdair
