A way to set maximum number of bookings per day
Hi, I currently have one service I offer in my Bookings but want to set it so that I only do a maximum of say 4 of that service in a day. On Gemini, Copilot, and another Microsoft forum post there's instructions to "go to the "Booking page" tab in the Microsoft Bookings app, select the service you want to limit, and then click on the "Edit" button. From there, you can set the maximum number of bookings per day for that service." or "Go to the Booking page tab in Bookings. Select the service you want to limit. Click "Edit" and set the "Maximum number of bookings per day." but when I got to edit my service, I only see these options, nothing about a maximum number of bookings option:
Bookings not respecting lead time
For the last few days, Bookings has not been respecting the "minimum lead time" on appointments - I have a 16-hour lead time set up, but at the moment, I can book myself within an hour of the current time. The "maximum lead time" seems to be respected, as I can't view availability further out than that. I've tried changing the lead time and re-saving it and creating a new appointment type to see if the settings would work there: neither worked, and still showed availability within the window I'd asked to be forbidden. It does seem to be respecting my calendar bookings and all other availability settings except the minimum lead time. Any suggestions on how to fix this? It's getting a bit disruptive when people are booking appointments with very little notice.
Problem with Bookings - calendars are gone from my profile, yet they're still active online
I am a teacher - I created multiple booking calendars for classes I teach, for the purpose of setting up meetings with students. When I last logged into Bookings, I tried to "Open" one of my calendars (to make some changes in the backend about my availability), however I was met with the message "We can't find any booking calendars". All of my booking calendars are gone. Nothing, but the calendar I most recently made is accessible in Bookings. However, oddly, my calendars still remain active online. So the problem is that I now don't have backend access to make changes to the calendar, I can't even delete them if I wanted too, but yet they remain live for students. Basically, I can no longer update the bookings pages I created. Any ideas on how to fix this? Here is the error message I receive: Even as I just open the search bar (without actually typing anything to search for), I get the "We can't find any booking calendars" message... Yet, here is an active link to the calendar, which I created: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/FINEINDG216@uofwaterloo.onmicrosoft.com/bookings/
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 😊
