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!
Delay in availability updating on self-service booking page
We're seeing delays after an appointment is booked before the time is no-longer listed as available on the self-service booking page. This is the error message when trying to book an appointment in a slot that has already been booked: Please try again Something went wrong We couldn't book that appointment. Please reload the page and try again. The delay appeared to be over 10 minutes earlier and currently appears to be around 2 minutes but I'm not sure I've seen a delay before today longer than a few seconds or long enough time to reload the page and still see the already booked slot still listed as available. Does anyone know what delay should be expected?
Teams status does not reflect availability
All calendar entries are visible within the Teams calendar, but unfortunately the Teams status does not reflect availability (free/busy status). I thought if there is an appointment in my Outlook/exchange the Teams status changes reflecting the availability?
Microsoft Bookings Ignoring Staff Time Off for availability
We have noticed that the availability on the Booking Page is not factoring in Time Off on a staff members calendar (in Bookings). This is causing appointments to be booked during time someone is not available. We have ~18k Appointments in the system over the past 3 years and are also finding Bookings to be very sluggish Here is the Calendar showing that time is blocked off Here is the Service Details Here is the Booking Page Availability Lastly here is the Staff Hours
Staff booked but showing free in Outlook
Hi, Not sure if this is the expected behaviour or a new bug because we have been using the service for few months and this is the first time someone is reporting that behaviour. When someone is doing a new booking, everything is working OK except the fact that the new "booking" meeting in the Staff's calendar is created with avaibility set to "free" Now if we go back to Booking, that's ok because we cannot book the same staff again for that period of time BUT in Outlook , we can still book a meeting with that staff member because he appears free Thanks KevStandalone Bookings calendar // not based on staff availability
PROBLEM: Users of Bookings require the ability to create calendars and associated services with a max amount of participants but not based on another staff member's schedule. USE CASE: HR training classes that employees are required to attend and sign up for. These do not require the prescense of the personnel establishing the class. Rather, an outside contractor could be conducting the class and HR personnel are simply providing the scheduling of that class. FIX: Provide new option on general availability drop-down of service setup for "Custom hours not based on staff hours"Cloned booking page and availability update?
Hi there, I created a booking page used to reserve services at an event and have cloned it to use for the next event. The services are only available during a specific multi-day timeframe with daily hours, so I had, in the past, set the availability both in the default scheduling policy and within the service itself (including "not bookable" dates that bookended the event week, and bookable "availability during these dates" with the custom hours for the event week). However, the dates are not showing as available on the new published booking page. I've combed through the staff availability, services, and booking page itself - I can't figure out what I need to change to make the event dates bookable on the public side. This was my problem with the last booking page - it took me forever to figure out how to "ungrey" the open dates, and now I'm missing something with this one again. Any suggestions?
