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 😊
Outlook calendar: Syntax for describing meeting series is off
When I set up a meeting series to occur on the fourth Wednesday of each month, for example, the calendar invite defaults to read "Occurs every fourth Wednesday." This is incorrect. The problem is more obvious if the meeting falls on, say, the second Wednesday (or whatever day) of the month. The invite then reads "Occurs every second Wednesday." No it does not! "Occurs on the second Wednesday monthly" is what it should read. Please fix!!!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?
"Scheduling Poll" unintentionally pitted against "Scheduling Assistant ... Why not both?
As a guest invited to a fellow outlook user's scheduling poll, it is unnecessarily difficult to propose additional times that make any sense. It's a strong start towards solving the scheduling problem it's intended to, but it doesn't usually hit the mark, and that's a missed opportunity. Several times, I received a scheduling poll, and each proposed time has already been rejected by one or more required attendees. This is where the "Propose another time" button at the bottom of the poll should help us, . . . Well it's not actually helpful, and will likely generate a lot of email traffic with low chances of helping. I'll explain. The first part of the problem is that there is just no information available about everyone else's schedule. So, how should we expect attendees to propose a reasonable suggestion, even if they are in the same organization and could have had that Free/busy information they need, elsewhere? Going across domains, it makes sense that the information isn't available. But 9 times out of 10, it actually is, because people are using this with people at their workplace. I just would have had to just start over from scratch, although that's bad form because the poll is already in play and this would nominally appear as a conflict. It's also pretty obvious duplicate effort. There just needs to be a better transition between meeting poll and a standard meeting invitation's scheduling assistant view. A person doing that would have to log in if they weren't already, but that seems perfectly fine. Perhaps more importantly, I've got to point out that this is a side-effect of the organizer-as-dictator problem that has been endemic to Outlook & exchange for decades. "FindTime"/"Scheduling Poll" has its place among cross-domain internet email users, but within a work or school environment, it's just good code thrown after bad. The fact that we sometimes need to do a poll before putting any info on the actual calendar is just silly. That's what the calendar is supposed to be for, but locking in the times and making yourself "organizer" just makes the work more awkward. And one last thing, I think it's a mistake that each "Propose another time" sends out another reply-all message. Considering how I described above that we're left just guessing what time could be any good, then sending two or three suggestions in as many separate email messages seems very wasteful. We should be able to set up a few times before saving them and having the poll email re-sent only one more time.
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?
