Using Microsoft Bookings to Support Creative & Niche Websites
Hi community! 👋 I'm currently using Microsoft Bookings to manage appointment scheduling for a project, and I’m looking for a way to restrict or filter out personal emails (like @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, etc.) from making bookings. What I've Tried So Far: Required custom field asking users to "Enter your business email" Manual review via "Admin Approval" setting Filtering in Outlook after the booking is created But these are still more like workarounds. Is there any built-in feature or third-party integration that can: ✅ Block bookings unless the email is from a business domain ✅ Auto-decline free/personal email addresses ✅ Or at least flag them in the calendar? Bonus Context: I run a digital experience site that blends online booking and content storytelling — one of our examples is this fun article combining real-life stories with booking-based workflows: 🔗 https://tirafficridergame.com/evel-knievel-mining-incident/ content. Any help or plugin tips would be appreciated! Thanks in advance! 🙏 — [ RazaHow to Filter or Block Non-Business Emails in Microsoft Bookings?
Hi community! 👋 I'm currently using Microsoft Bookings to manage appointment scheduling for a project, and I’m looking for a way to restrict or filter out personal emails (like @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, etc.) from making bookings. What I've Tried So Far: Required custom field asking users to "Enter your business email" Manual review via "Admin Approval" setting Filtering in Outlook after the booking is created But these are still more like workarounds. Is there any built-in feature or third-party integration that can: Block bookings unless the email is from a business domain Auto-decline free/personal email addresses Or at least flag them in the calendar? Bonus Context: I run a digital experience site that blends online booking and content storytelling — one of our examples is this fun article combining real-life stories with booking-based workflows: 🔗 https://tirafficridergame.com/evel-knievel-mining-incident/ It’s not a direct tutorial, but we're expanding into more productivity-related content. Any help or plugin tips would be appreciated! Thanks in advance! 🙏 — [Raza] Let me know if you want to change the topic or make it more technical, SEO-focused, or tutorial-style.
Additional information on booking confirmation
Hello, I have information I need to edit, but cannot find where it is entered on the service. When I get the appointment confirmation to my business email is has the below information included. Where is the additional information section being pulled from? I cannot find this messaging anywhere. Buffer time -------------------- Before: 0 minutes (09:15 a.m.) Time with customer: 09:15 a.m.–10:15 a.m. After: 30 minutes (10:45 a.m.) Time Zone: (UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada) Additional Information -------------------- Please note that applications for the 2025-26 Academic Year (August 1, 2025 – July 31, 2026) will not be available until mid-May of 2025. Thank you
Microsoft Bookings - Bad Request
Hi All, I work in higher education, and we have been using Microsoft Bookings so that faculty could schedule 1-on-1 meetings with our instructional design team for assistance with Canvas. This was working perfectly for about a month, but recently a lot of users have been reporting a "Bad Request" error. I've noticed that the Bookings link has started routing users to https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/ which is generating the Bad Request error whereas the link used to direct to the Bookings page fine. I've noticed that clearing cache/cookies or going into an incognito window is a workaround, but I was wondering if anyone knew a more permanent fix for this issue. Thank you for any assistance and I will update this thread if I figure something out on my end.
Please, please, please make a louder timezone for bookings!
My students come from all over the world. When the register for the university they often set their account timezone as their home timezone. Then they are very confused later when living at the University when their bookings are all off. There is a pretty little timezone icon, but I want a warning or something if their timezone and my timezone are a mismatch. Something, anything to help them to successfully sign up and not be surprised when I tell them they do not have an appointment for the time they "clicked". The timezone needs to be very loud on the page. Currently it is behind that beautiful globe button that no student is going to see.
How to have multiple services using only one mailbox and one booking site.
I've seen people on here have had the displeasure of running into the same problem I had: To manage multiple services through one booking site while still being able to allow conflicting appointments and have all appointments gathered in a single Outlook calendar rather than the Bookings calendar in Teams. The problem If you connect more than one service in Bookings to a single staff member the slot gets occupied in the schedule and therefore unavailable. If service #1 is booked at 9pm on the 25th of April, that time slot is marked as occupied and blocked from further interaction. If another person visits the site a few minutes later and tries to book service #2 at the same date and at the same time, it's simply not possible as the slot is shown as unavailable as it's occupied. A rather easy fix would be to assign each service it's own Booking site but the maintenance would be awful. User request The user wanted a number of employees to handle the booking site of multiple services but not by associating service#1 to Employee#1, Service#2 to Employee#2 and so on but by having all the employees receiving updates from all the services and for them to be able to get a complete overview of the appointments in Outlook rather than in Teams. TL;DR: All services managed from one calendar in Outlook. Research - trial and error I initially came up with the idea to use a single distribution list to get all the employees to receive appointments but I came to the brutal realization of this not solving the trouble of the time slot being occupied by another service once one service was booked. So had to set up 6 different distribution lists simply to act as “staff members”, one for each station. Service1 mail, service2 mail etc and then I connected them to its equivalent on the website (service1 mail handling service #1 on the website) This was how I got around having to set up multiple booking sites and could handle all the service bookings on one site, making the administration a bit more manageable. Persistent issue Setting up 6 different distribution lists did solve the occupancy issue in the calendars but it did not solve the issue of trying to show 7 different calendars in Outlook while trying to maintain a decent layout. (6 services calendars plus the user’s personal calendar) = chaos. The ACTUAL fix! I continued brainstorming and while doing so I fired up Powershell and tried making use of ExchangeOnline commands. I went through every single argument out there but was left disappointed and pretty much about to give up but then something just clicked. I got the idea to use a shared mailbox as the sole member and owner of every single distribution list I had created. This would theoretically mean that the shared mailbox would receive every single appointment from Microsoft Bookings as well as gathering all the appointments in one single calendar. And then just hand the employees full access to the shared mailbox. I was however met with stern resistance immediately as I was only allowed to set a UserMailbox as the owner of a distribution list in EAC. So I had to turn back to PowerShell. The argument “ManagedBy” is the PowerShell-equivalent of owner in EAC. To change the owner of a distribution list you must install the ExchangeOnline-module in Powershell, then login with your admin credentials. Command to change owner: Set-DistributionGroup -Identity “service1@yourcompany . com” -ManagedBy "SharedMailbox @ yourcompany . com" Command to add the shared mailbox as member: Add-DistributionGroupMember -identity "service1@yourcompany . com" -Member "SharedMailbox @ yourcompany . com" So I did this for all the distribution lists I had created. Next I had to go back to EAC to remove every existing member of the distribution lists apart from the shared mailbox which meant it was now the only member and owner. Therefore all appointments made at the booking site are now forwarded to the inbox of the shared mailbox. You can’t set just set any type of mailbox as the owner of a distribution list though, it has got to be UserMailbox, Legacy, Team, RemoteUser,Room etc. Which type of mailbox you end up picking is mostly down to personal preference but I chose to go with a shared mailbox as I was somewhat familiar with it’s user-scope. Just to rule out any possible conflict issue I allowed conflicting meetings for the shared mailbox which means that two appointments at the same date and time would stack on top each other instead of cancelling each other out. Command to Allow conflicts: Set-CalendarProcessing -identity "SharedMailbox @ yourcompany . com" -AllowConflicts $true Done! All appointments will now be sent to a shared mailbox and they will all be gathered in one single calendar 😊
Time zone erratically assigned
I'm using Bookings through an Education account at an R1 university. I have attempted setting up my calendar availability many different ways in Bookings, but I continue to experience the same error about which many others have complained. Unfortunately, the workaround that seems to work for business users is not an option in educational accounts. The option to "Always show time slots in business time zone" appears nowhere. This morning, I had a student book an appointment with me, thinking it was at 10a (PST), when it was actually a slot for 1pm (EST, and where we are located). The confirmation email I received showed the time as 12p (CST). This seems to be a perennial problem with Bookings, yet no one seems to have a solution for it in this particular context. We're not technically a "business," but major universities are BIG money for Microsoft. I can only imagine how much profit they are making selling their platform to a university like this, with >32k students and >12,000 employees, across all campuses. It seems like y'all might consider re-working the application code to develop a more stable solution. I never had this issue when our University still allowed us to use Google calendar with students. If someone has an answer, I will be forever in your debt.Problem with Time Zones
I use bookings to arrange meetings with students. Often, students schedule a meeting and it appears to them in a different time zone, even though we are geographically in the same place. Perhaps they have a different time zone set somewhere in a Microsoft app, or perhaps the default when signing up for a meeting as a guest is somehow set to a different time zone--what ever the case, there seems to be a problem with default time zones for students. My time zones are all set to Eastern time across Bookings and Outlook. This issue is causing me (and my 12 colleagues) significant scheduling problems as we need to schedule hundreds of meetings with students. When I search for solutions in community postings, it seems like selecting "Always show time slots in business time zone" would solve our problem. But this option does not appear in my Bookings setting anywhere that I can find. I have tried to follow step by step processes from Microsoft help pages, but the settings menus in the tutorials do not look like mine. If it is helpful to know, I use an Apple MacBook Air M3; I access my Bookings page through Teams and my Firefox browser; and I use Outlook through the app.
Force bookings start time to be on the hour, always
I am trying to set up an appointment service. Our appointments are 50 minutes long, to give us time to write up after and the student time to get to their lectures etc. People in our org also regularly schedule 50 min meetings that aren't through bookings. I have set it so that they start at 1 hour intervals, and have a 10 minute buffer after. This works fine most of the time. However, if I am available 10:00-14:00 on a Tuesday, and have an existing meeting in my calendar from 10:00-10:50, then the appointments show on bookings at 10:50, 11:50 and 12:50 for that day. This really doesn't work for our or the student's availability. Other than going through and manually adding a 10 minute appointment in my calendar at the end of any meeting, which isn't really feasible due to how busy we are, is there any way to force bookings to start "on the hour" every time, or another workaround others can think of? (I thought of moving the buffer to the beginning, which might help for the 50 min example, however if I had a meeting in from 9:30-10:30, appointments would then just go at 10:40, 11:40, etc) Thanks in advance for any suggestions
