Microsoft 365: Bookings - Initial Setup

Do you need to help coordinate appointments for the lab, the classroom, or office hours? Microsoft Bookings can help and is integrated directly into your outlook calendar and is available to New Paltz Staff and Faculty. If you are looking to organize appointments for a department we recommend a shared account or MS Teams.

Please Note: While Bookings does offer the options of using both phone and text message capabilities we do not support phone calls or texting via booking. Additionally, if there is a charge for texts messaging you or your department may be liable for payment. We recommend using the email notifications options only.

Getting Started with Bookings

If you are looking to setup Bookings to allow your calendar (or ones of faculty/staff in your department) see below.  If you are instead looking for how to use bookings to book existing calendars, see "using Bookings" in the related articles section of this page.

1. Sign into Microsoft 365 (via outlook.newpaltz.edu) using your @newpaltz.edu address (note - even students should use their username@newpaltz.edu, not their username@hawkmail.newpaltz.edu - the password is the same)
2. Click the App Launcher at the top left
   
3. Click All apps then choose Bookings
4. Click "Get it now" (note - if you set this up under your own account before - it may show something else)
   
5. Click "Add a booking calendar"
   
6. Enter something for the "Business Name" and "Business Type".
   • For the Business name - if you are using this for yourself personally (i.e. for students to book appointments with you) you may want to use your name only as the Business Name.  If you are doing this for a department, you may want to use the department name, or a specific function at the department (i.e. Library, or Library Study Rooms)
   • For Business Type - just type Colleges and the option or "Colleges & Universities" should come up.
     
7. After a moment, the initial setup will be complete and you will be at the Bookings homepage (https://outlook.office.com/bookings/homepage).  You can get back here also by using the first three steps of this section.
   

You can now begin to configure your bookings page

The Home tab is a general overview of your page

The Calendar tab allows you to see what appointments have been scheduled and with who

The Bookings Page tab will need some configuration to setup, please follow the below steps

• Under Booking Page Access Control check the two boxes "Require a Microsoft 365 account from my organization to book" and "Disable direct search engine indexing of booking page"
• Email notifications should have both boxes checked to confirm that customers are kept up to date.
• If you allow the client to select who they will be meeting with you can enable that feature under Staff by checking the Allow customer to choose box
• You can get an Embed code from here for a department website. Please see below for more details
• The customer color scheme for SUNY New Paltz colors is #003e7e and #f58426

The Customers tab will keep record of the different people who have used Bookings with your department. If you need to close your appointments for whatever reason you can use the time off tab to schedule for one, a selection, or all of your bookings staff and have it reflect on the bookings site.

The Staff tab is very important because this where you will add the staff whose time will be booked and those that will manage those appointments 

• Click "Add staff".
• In the "Add People" box - type a users name, if it does not come up automatically click "Search Directory" and it will 
• choose "Administrator" or "Viewer" for their role - if they need to change existing appointments they will need to be an administrator (which also means they can make changes to the bookings site)
• Under availability check off "Events on Office calendar affect availability" to prevent scheduling conflicts
• You can also set unique hours for each of your staff members here based upon their availability (default hours are defined in the Business Information tab)
• Please note that the phone number will be viewable by others and we recommend using your directory listing
• When completed click save and this person will now be a part of the Bookings Staff

The Appointment Type tab is very important as this will define what you are making available to clients and customers. Click on Add a appointment type to get started. You will have to define the name, the description, the location, and many other options. This is a highly configurable area although most information is straight forward. Please note that we do not support nor do we recommend using the enable text message notification for your customer - if charges are incurred through its use you or your department will be responsible for the charges.

The Business Information tab allows for the setting of some of the information about your department or organization that will be presented to visitors in some form or another while on your site. You can also define default business hours here.

Department Websites

For Departments or Organizations the Office of Communication and Marketing can embed a bookings calendar into your department page. To do this they will need the embed code from the Bookings Page tab and a ticket submitted containing this information. Here is how to get it and submit it.

Go to the Booking apage tab > click the </> Embed button

This will open a sub-window. Select copy next to the HTML code option.

Paste this code into the request window with all other pertinent information that they will need

To open a ticket for OCM please use this link - https://newpaltz.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/1905/Portal/Requests/ServiceDet?ID=15886

Teams and Bookings

As a Microsoft App Bookings easily integrates with the Teams App for easy management

In the Teams App click the more added apps button  (shown as three dots)

Right click the Bookings app and Pin it

This will add Bookings to your Team app and you can manage your calendar directly from Teams

Tips & Caveats

• If you are using a shared mailbox calendar (i.e. your department mailbox) and not your individual mailbox - you may want to ensure that your own calendar is not bookable via this (it is by default if you are the one who setup Bookings).  For example, you may have three calendars for different study rooms and have each one setup as a Service in the Services section.
  • Go to the Services tab in Bookings
  • Click on a service there and scroll down to the "Assign Staff" section
  • Make sure your own account is not assigned.  If you are doing one service per shared mailbox - make sure each shared mailbox is only selected for a single service.
• While a shared mailbox can be added to staff, individual accounts should be added to the staff tab to ensure their access. You can still use a shared mailbox as the actual 'booking' calendar (i.e. if you don't want to book individual staff but want to book a shared resource).
• If don't select the options of Require a Microsoft 365 account from my organization to book and Disable direct search engine indexing of booking page you will be very accessible to the entire Internet and searchable on search engines (like Google). This will open you to fraudulent or malicious appointments which we will have no ability to mitigate. We do not support and do not recommend this.
• We do not support linking of bookings to Facebook or other social media sites.
• We do not support nor do we recommend using the enable text message notification for your customer - if charges are incurred through its use you or your department will be responsible for the charges.