Follow this guide to create shared booking pages for meetings and appointments in Microsoft Bookings
Microsoft Bookings is included in Microsoft Business Premium licences and offers a seamless experience for your customers to book time appointments with your business.
Read our related blog if you're looking to learn how Microsoft Bookings can help your business.
If you want to create a personal booking page instead of a group one, follow this guide to creating a personal booking page in Microsoft Bookings instead.
Good to know
There are a few things worth understanding before embarking on setting up your shared booking page.
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Terminology
Microsoft calls the different types of meetings you create "services". All your publicly visible services are shown on your shared booking page.
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Booking calendar
When you create a shared booking page it creates a shared calendar that you and staff that you invite have access to via Bookings. This calendar has also has an optional self-service booking page associated with it that can either be publicly available, or restricted to be bookable by internal staff only.
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Shared booking pages create a user account
When you create your shared booking page, in the example below we created on called "Test", a new unlicenced user account is generated in your tenancy. In our case, a user was created with the email address of test@itfoundations.com.
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Deleting shared booking pages
There is no easy way to delete shared booking pages with Bookings. This can only be done from within your Microsoft Admin Console by a system administrator. Bear this in mind when testing.
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Shared calendars
Microsoft Bookings is designed to work with individual's calendars. It uses their calendar to work out availability and book appointments. It is not designed to create bookings on a shared calendar as it has no visibility of when staff are free.
Step-by-step guide to creating a new shared booking page
- Head to https://microsoft365.com, login with your Microsoft account details, then click the 9 dots at the top left of the page. Search for and click on Bookings.
- On the Bookings home page that loads, find the section labelled “Shared booking pages” and click on Create booking page.
- It's likely if you're following this guide, that you've not created a shared booking page before. If that is the case you will only see the option to create a booking page from scratch. If there is already an existing shared booking page on your tenancy you have the option to clone it to use as your starting point.
Click Create from Scratch
- On the next page, you have a few options to pick.
- Give your booking page a name like 'My Company booking page' or 'Sales booking page'
- [optional] Upload a logo. There is no official guidance on what size this should be but generally a square logo works well. There is no point in uploading anything with too high a resolution so aim for about 500 x 500 pixels as you don't want it to dominate the page. You can change this later in the process anyway.
- [optional] Choose your business type from the dropdown list
- Your business hours will default to Mon-Fri 9-5 but you can adjust these here.
- Hit next
- On this page, you can invite members of your team to the booking page. Start typing their name or their email address and they should appear in the dropdown list. Select them when they do and they'll appear below you.
Note that you don't need to invite everyone at this stage. You can add and remove people later on.
Any staff you invite will automatically be given the role of Team member. You can adjust that now, or down the line. The different roles available are:
- Team member - this role can manage bookings on their own calendar and their adjust their availability.
- Scheduler - this role can manage bookings on the shared booking calendar and edit customer details. They have read-only access to settings.
- Viewer - a viewer can see all the bookings on the calendar, but they can't change or delete them. They have read-only access to settings.
- Guest - a guest can be assigned to bookings (allowing you to book sessions with a third-party consultant for example), but they can't open the booking mailbox to see everything else that is booked.
Hit Next.
- On this screen, you can add your first service. By default, a 30-minute Teams meeting, available during your business hours, is created. You can click on "Change" to adjust this now. You can also adjust this later on. You can also add additional services later too.
Hit Next.
- Here you can set who can make bookings on your page.
- Anyone - If you want customers to be able to make bookings this must be set to Anyone.
- People in my organisation - If you want to set up a booking page for only your staff to use (perhaps for internal services or if you employ a scheduler) then choose to limit it to People in my organisation.
- No self-service - this will create the shared booking calendar, but will not create an associated self-service booking page. Your staff would interact with the calendar (accessed through the Bookings app that you are in right now) to create and adjust appointments directly.
Press Create. The platform will take a few minutes to generate your booking page. Once it's done you'll see a confirmation. From here, click Get started to delve deeper into your new booking page and further customise it.
Congratulations. You have now created a shared booking page. Unfortunately, that's not you done. There is a lot more configuration to do to tailor your shared booking page.
Configuring your shared booking page
You will now see the management page for your new booking page.
From here you can fully manage the booking page including viewing the calendar (as shown in the screenshot above). Here you can view, and interact ,with all bookings across all services on this booking page.
There are several sections available through the left-hand navigation that you should spend time adjusting before sharing your page more widely. We'll look at each in turn below.
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Booking page
There are many collapsed menus in here that you expand by clicking the chevron on the right-hand side.
- Business page access control
Unless you want your page to be findable by search engines you want to check Disable direct search engine indexing.
Require a one-time password asks users to verify their booking email by sending them a code when they try to book. The code will sent to their email and they'll be asked to put it in to confirm their booking. This does make for a less pleasant user experience but is useful to ensure that people have provided the correct email address.
- Customer data usage consent
This allows you to comply with any relevant data protection legislation applicable in your area. You can explicitly require customers to consent to ou gathering their data for the purpose of making the booking.
- Default scheduling policy
Here you will set the default scheduling settings that you want to apply to all new services that you create. Most of the options are straightforward to adjust but there's a big Gotcha's in here!
If you leave 'send a meeting invite to the customer' unchecked then your client will NOT get confirmation of their meeting and will NOT get a meeting link to a Teams meeting. Make sure you check this box!
It is also worth being aware that if you leave the "Notify the business via email" unchecked, the specific member of staff that has been booked will still be alerted to a new booking. This option will send an additional email to the businesses saved email that you will set in the Business information section below.
- Customise your page
Here you can adjust how the booking page looks.
- Region and time zone settings
The last box allows you to adjust what time zone is shown to users.
If you tick 'Always show time slots in business time zone, it will display in the time zone you set above for your business. if you leave it unchecked, it will display to the user in their local zone.
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Customers
You've nothing to do here. Once customers start to book services with you, this page will populate with their details. Your staff can come here to adjust bookings for a customer.
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Staff
Here you can add new staff, edit existing staff, and remove staff from your booking page.
In the panel on the right you can also book appointments for this specific member of staff.
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Services
This page is where you create and manage all the services that you want to offer on the shared booking page. There are myriad options for tailoring your service within the 5 options in the left-hand navigation menu.
Click on the images below to enlarge them and scroll through each section of options.
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Basic details - The majority of the fields here are straightforward but there are a few worth highlighting
- If the 'Default scheduling policy' toggle is enabled then your normal business hours will flow through If you want to offer custom hours this needs to be untoggled.
- Publishing options allows you to create shared booking services that aren't shown on the booking page. This allows your members of staff to send booking links for specific services that aren't normally visible publicly.
- Maximum number of attendees:
- Maximum of 1 person - these completely block the time slot off once booked. Meeting links can shared to invite others in but once it has been booked, no one else can book the same slot. These are appropriate for meetings and consultations.
- Maximum of 2 or more - these allow many people to book the same time before it becomes unavailable. They're useful for running group events.
- Availability Options - This section is where you set how granularly you want available time slots to be shown, how soon and how far away someone can book a meeting and when to show availability. Generally you will want this set to 'Bookable when staff are free'.
- Assign staff - The toggle at the top of this section allows you to control how availability is how.
- Assign any of you selected staff shows availability when any single member of your staff is available
- Assign all of your selected staff shows availability only when everyone on the team is available.
The toggle switch gives customers the opportunity to choose which member of staff they want to book from those available, instead of simply booking the service and being assigned a random team member.
If you don't assign any staff here, the service will not be bookable so be sure to add at least one member of staff to every service.
- Customised fields - add or remove fields that will be displayed on your booking form. It is generally recommend to request the minimum amount of information needed to increase the likelihood of someone completing your form. The more information you ask for, the more likely it is that someone will abandon their booking.
- Notifications - Set your reminders and follow up emails here. These notifications could include important details, such as location information or pre-appointment requirements. You can link to Microsoft Form to gather further details from your client too.
Reminders can help customers to cancel or re-schedule their meetings if they are no longer suitable for them. This further reduces the likelihood of no-shows at meetings.
If your business has Microsoft Teams Premium licences you can also configure SMS meeting reminders.
Important - the gotcha's that we mentioned above about notifications applies here too. If you skipped over that part, go back and read it!
When you're satisfied that you've configured the service as you want, click Save Changes.
Your service is now available on your booking page. Repeat the steps above to create as many services as you need on this booking page.
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Business Information
This final section is where you can set, and adjust, your general business information that will flow down to all services, as well as affect the booking page itself. It's all straight forward information to complete.
For most businesses, they can ignore the final section about Azure ACS integration and the integrations tab. If you need to integrate other solutions, seek help from an IT specialist.
Sharing Your booking page
Now that your Shared booking page is all setup and ready to be used you just need to grab the URL and add to it your website, email footer, or distribute to staff to share it as an when it's needed.
Sharing Individual Services
Individual services can be shared by clicking on the copy URL icon beside a service in the Shared Page management Services area
Sharing the whole booking page
You can share the entire booking page including all your services by going back to the Bookings homepage and selecting the share icon for the shared booking page.
This presents a dropdown menu with a variety of options for visibility. Generally most businesses will want to select Available to anyone to ensure that your customers can access the page.
Once selected, a booking link will be displayed along with the options to copy it, generate an email with it in and code to embed the page into a website. Select the appropriate option and distribute it.
What a Microsoft Shared booking page looks like
If you send a customer a link to your full booking page they will see something like the image below:
Editing a Microsoft Bookings shared booking page
If you need to edit a listing, simply return to the Bookings Home page and click the shared booking page that you want to change and navigate to the appropriate area. Remember to hit Save changes when you are done..
Next steps...?
If you need any more assistance with configuring and managing your Microsoft 365 get in touch with us today. Our team of Edinburgh based experts are available to help.