Allow others to schedule time with you
- Sean Stockburger (Unlicensed)
Microsoft Bookings is an online appointment scheduling tool that is included in the Microsoft 365 license for faculty and staff. The following example shows how Bookings can be used to allow others to schedule appointments with you.
Outlook and Teams have a built-in scheduling assistant that allows a meeting organizer to invite you, as well as others, to a meeting based on when your calendar is open. Bookings allows you to offer a set of predefined days and times for a specific service like Office Hours. Bookings will still check your Outlook calendar to make sure you are available, so a student will not be able to book an appointment when you are already busy.
Instructions
Open the Microsoft Bookings app from the Microsoft 365 apps grid
You will be prompted to create a name for your “business.” Choose something descriptive and unique, like “Professor Smith’s Office Hours”
It will take a few seconds for your business and calendar to be created. The next step will prompt you to add staff, but you can skip that step if you are just trying to set up a booking service for your own calendar. Instead, click on Business Information
On the Business Information page you can add details about your business, including a logo or photo. You can also specify the available hours on this page. If you want to offer more than one type of booking service (different hours for different classes, for example), you can create custom hours of availability for each service. If you do not specify custom hours for a service, it will use the scheduling policy you define on the Booking Page in the next step.
Click on Booking Page to customize the look of your page and to set scheduling policies. There are a couple of options that can help you avoid form spam (yes, unfortunately that is a thing): You can choose to restrict bookings to WWU Microsoft 365 accounts, and/or disable direct search engine indexing of your page. Disabling the direct search engine indexing means your students will need to use the link you provide to them via email, Canvas, Teams, Zoom, etc. They will not be able to search for your page on Google. If you choose to restrict bookings to WWU Office 365 accounts, your students will be prompted to sign in with their username@wwu.edu and their WWU universal password.
Once you have your page options set, click the Save and Publish button. This will allow you to copy a URL to your page that you can add to your Canvas course, email signature, web page, or any other place you want it to be available.
Note the section for availability - as the only staff member your services will not be bookable during times when you already have appointments on your Outlook calendar. You can override this by choosing to set up custom hours.
Click on Services to set up the actual service you want to offer on your Bookings page. You may see an example service called “Initial Consult.” Click on that service to edit it, or create a new service. Give the service a name like “Office Hours” and a description.
If you want your office hours to be booked as an online meeting, toggle the “Add online meeting” option. This will create a Teams online meeting for each appointment booked.
Leave the pricing set to “Price not set” so nothing appears regarding a price.
The scheduling options allow you to schedule things like buffer time, length of each appointment, minimum or maximum lead time, and whether you want to specify custom hours of availability for this service.
Before you click SAVE, scroll to the bottom and find your name listed as a staff member. Click your name to place a checkmark next to your name. Then click the Save button.
Test your bookings page! Use a personal email address to book an appointment (if you restricted it to WWU authenticated users, ask a student or colleague to help you test).
Your Outlook calendar will show appointments that are booked for you, and you can see all booked services on the Bookings calendar as well. Notifications will depend on the options you specify.