Service overview
As part of the Office 365 offering, Microsoft Bookings is an online and mobile app for groups or individuals who provide services to customers on an appointment basis. For example, Bookings can be leveraged to schedule individual or group training sessions, either in person or online.
Features include:
- A group booking page where your customers can schedule appointments with the staff members who are available to provide the service. You can show this page on your own web site or through a link, where your customers can schedule appointments. You can restrict access to your bookings page by applying access controls.
- A set of web pages where the group owners can manage staff lists and schedules, define services and pricing, set business hours, and customize how services and staff are scheduled.
- A personal booking page where you can create custom meeting types to share with others so they can easily schedule time with you based on your availability and preferences. You control whether each meeting type is public to your scheduling page or is private and can only be accessed by a select group of people.
Who can use it
McGill faculty, staff and actively registered students can obtain a license to create a bookings page.
How to request & access the service
Register for training (mandatory):
You must first register for training before you are able to set up a bookings page to offer appointments.
- To register, go to the Collaboration Solutions ITS page.
- Click on "Microsoft Bookings - Intro and License request".
- Choose an available date and time that works for you and click Submit.
When you have completed training, in order to request a booking license and have access to set up a bookings page, you will be required to fill out the MS Bookings license form. The link to the MS Bookings license form is provided in the MS Bookings training.
Access Bookings (once the license is activated):
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Cost
There is no cost to use this service.
Availability
The service is available 24 X 7, except during planned maintenance or outages.
Check the Microsoft Office 365 website for announcements, maintenance or unexpected downtime.
Frequently asked questions
What is a group booking?
Group bookings lets you set up service appointments where multiple people can join a session with a single staff member. You can use group bookings to schedule conferences, lectures or training sessions with several people at the same time.
When you create the service, on the Services page, under Maximum number of attendees, enter the number of people who can attend this event. Once you set the maximum number, the attendee list can't exceed the number you set.
What is a personal booking?
Bookings With Me is a web-based personal scheduling page that integrates with the free/busy information from your Outlook calendar. It can only be used for 1:1 meetings. You can leverage public and private meeting types. Public meeting types are available to anyone that you share your Bookings page link with. Private meeting types are only available to people that you share the individual private meeting type with.
Best practices & policies
- Although Bookings is a McGill-approved cloud service, where you can store protected and personal data, it must not be used to store certain types of regulated data. For definitions of the various types of institutional data, and guidance on which type of data cannot be stored in Bookings, see cloud services that have been approved / rejected for McGill use.
- When you personalize the form for booking an appointment, make sure not to ask for any personal data if you don’t have a need for that information. A good practice is to ask yourself, "Do I really need to ask for this information?" If you can look it up on a system such as Banner, then the answer should be "No".
- If you have to ask for personal data to book the appointment, you can add a “Customer data usage consent” checkbox, so that the person can acknowledge that you are collecting and storing this information.
Training & documentation
Find more information about MS Bookings and Bookings with me on the Microsoft website.
Support
For MS Bookings users, sign up for a MS Bookings Q&A chat session.
For access/authentication issues and basic assistance contact the IT Service Desk