Getting Started with Microsoft Bookings

What is Bookings?

Bookings is an application available through Microsoft 365 that lets you provide a web portal by which others can book time with you and your team. Similar to a storefront, you can configure different services or types of appointments you offer, their duration, and even assign yourself or other team members as the ones who will field the request. It integrates with Microsoft Outlook calendars to search for available times. Visitors to your site can return to manage their bookings and cancel or reschedule.

Bookings pages (or sites) can be of two varities:

• Personal Bookings page - for allowing others to schedule your time as an individual (works with your Outlook calendar).
• Shared Bookings page - for a team or organization to collaborate to provide services or interview prospective employees and allow people — either in your organization or outside of it — to schedule time with an available team member (works with the service settings you configure and the Outlook calendars of all the staff you designate to handle that service). 

This image shows an example of a shared Bookings page for "SLE Technology Training." This is the view that customers see when they wish to book an appointment.

Best Practices and MSU-specific Info

Before you get started learning Bookings, please read these best practices to help you understand how MSU and SLE use Bookings.

• It is best to create booking pages for your team, role or service (rather than for an individual) and to designate more than one Admin. For individuals, you should have access to a Personal Bookings page already tied to your account.
• When you request a shared Bookings page from MSU IT, three objects get created: a web page, a calendar, and an email address that will show up in the Spartan Mail directory.
• How you name your page is important as it will impact the web address (URL) and the email address. These items cannot be changed once created. If the name needs to be changed, you would have to discard the page and request a new one.
• SLE recommends that when you request your page that you begin the name with SLE, if possible, to help people find it. MSU IT will likely add the word "Bookings" to the beginning of your page's name.
• A new shared Bookings page cannot be linked or tied to an existing email account or calendar. A new, unique account and calendar will be created.
• On-call and temporary team members do not automatically have a license or access for Bookings. A request must be submitted to Digital Strategies and Services so a license gets purchased from the MSU Tech Store.

Requesting a Bookings Page

In many Bookings tutorials on the Internet, they show steps for creating your own shared Bookings page. However at MSU, that feature is turned off and all requests are routed through MSU IT. If you would like a shared Bookings page, after reviewing the best practices section above, submit your request via this MSU IT Bookings Request Form.

When your page is created, you will receive an email notification with the final name of your Bookings page. Then you can access Bookings, search for your calendar/page and configure all your settings.

Accessing and Setting Up Bookings

Click a picture to enlarge it.

1. Go to spartan365.msu.edu and locate the Bookings app. If you do not see it initially, you may need to select the Application Launcher (Grid of 9 dots), then select More Apps. 
    
2. If Bookings is not an option, select All Apps to find it.
   
    
3. If this is your first time opening Bookings, you will be presented with a welcome/tip screen. You can click through these tips.
4. After you have clicked through all the tips you will be presented with a Lets get started! page. To open your page, go to the Shared bookings pages area and click the Search Button.
    
5. In the Discover booking pages prompt, enter your the name of the newly created bookings page (should have been provided by email when created). Select your page from the search results.
   
6. When you find and select your page, you should see a screen similar to the example below, and you can begin configuring your new Bookings account.
7. Configure your page!
   For an excellent explanation of setting up and configuring your shared Bookings page, see this YouTube video by Heather Majors (15 min to watch). This link will start you at the section of the video that is relevant. Before this section of the video, Heather shows how to create a shared Booking site, which is done by MSU IT here at MSU — so your can disregard the portion of the video before this point. 

Training Resources

• For additional information about Bookings in general, check out Microsoft's Bookings training material (microsoft.com).
• For more info about Personal Bookings pages, see this additional YouTube video by Heather Majors.