When it comes to scheduling appointments or meetings with people who don’t have direct access to your calendar, there might be a lot of back and forth trying to pin down a date and time that works for all. Bobcats at Texas State have found a way to streamline that process with Microsoft Bookings.
What is Bookings?
Microsoft Bookings is a scheduling software that is free to all Texas State staff and faculty as part of the Microsoft 365 suite. A person who wishes to meet with you can look at your Bookings page to see your availability. They can select a date and time that works for them and book it!
The date/times displayed as available will depend on how you set-up your Bookings page. There are a couple ways I’ve seen people at Texas State set-up theirs:
- General availability
- Set-up specific days/times (such as Monday to Friday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.).
- Based on staff availability
- You can add staff to the page and allow them to be bookable, which will connect their Outlook calendars and personal availability. Although, their actual calendar will not be visible to anyone. You can also choose whether you want people to be able to book with specific staff or keep the staff anonymous.
Time increment settings will affect the length of the appointment/meeting, such as 30 minutes, 1 hour, etc. Services can also be set-up, which allows people to choose different appointment types that can also affect the duration.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways Texas State faculty and staff are using the service.
Office of Distance and Extended Learning (ODEL)
ODEL is using Bookings to allow people to schedule 1-to-1 training sessions with them. On their bookings page, people can choose between two services, “Fall Flexible Teaching Support” and “Mini Lecture Recording Sessions.”
The session duration is displayed, and clicking the “i” icon prompts a pop-up with more information on the session.
Once someone chooses their session, they can see the available dates and times from a calendar below. The person picks their desired meeting time within the available window.
At the bottom of the form, ODEL asks for basic information like name, email address, phone number, and gives them a space for notes. Then they just book it!
Department of Psychology
Benjamin Smith, the TSP for the Psychology department, uses Bookings to limit the capacity of their graduate student office to 50% to keep students safe and socially distanced this fall.
Grad students can use a Bookings page to reserve one hour in the office. Each one-hour block only allows up to seven registrations, so only seven people total (50% capacity) can schedule to be in the office at a time. Once a time block reaches seven people, it becomes no longer available for new people to register.
Smith praised Bookings and called it a straight-forward scheduling app.
“It packs a lot of features making it flexible for the various departmental needs,” he said. “The automated features in bookings are essential to our department’s needs. We have set up automatic confirmation responses upon booking, automatic reminders as their reservation approaches, and the students’ ability to manage or modify their booking.”
Bookings allows the department to see real-time reservation information to monitor room usage. It also keeps a log of all reservations, including the contact information provided by those who booked a session, which is particularly helpful for contact tracing if necessary, he said.
Smith said that he could see Bookings being used to reserve specific computers in labs too. To do this, each computer would be listed as a service. Then students would be scheduling time for that computer.
“I would recommend Bookings to anyone looking to manage the scheduling of rooms or reserving resources like a PC lab,” he said.
Human Resources
The HR department is also utilizing bookings to schedule 45-minute retirement meetings to go over topics such as retiree insurance, paperwork questions, and the retirement process.
Like ODEL and Psychology’s use, people can see the date and times available and select their preferred time. In addition, HR uses a drop-down so people can choose between two staff members, and they ask for additional information to be provided in text fields such as date of retirement.
Heather Houston, benefits manager with HR, set-up the Bookings page and said that she is really liking it, particularly the integration with Microsoft Teams.
“It is integrated with Microsoft Teams so I didn’t have to mess with sending calendar invites or creating Teams meetings, so that was nice,” she said. “Once the employee books a meeting, they get confirmation with the Teams link and so do we.”
Houston said Bookings was just what she needed, and she highly recommended it to others for scheduling appointments.
“It was really a life saver when we were trying to find a way work more efficiently with everything going on right now,” she said.
If you’re interested in giving Bookings a try, log into Microsoft 365 and get started.
Steffanie Agnew is the digital marketing strategist in the IT Marketing and Communications office.
