»Microsoft Bookings

Go to the Microsoft Bookings home page and log in with your Chapman credentials to access the platform. The home page allows you to create Bookings pages or clone one of your existing pages and edit.

Bookings will work best if all of the people you want to assign to your calendar use an Office 365 calendar to manage their workday.

If you are managing office hours appointments for multiple instructors, teaching assistants, or staff, you’ll need to add them to your Bookings calendar. If they use an Office 365 Calendar (usually the calendar in Outlook) to manage their schedules, Bookings can sync with staff calendars so that visitors to your Bookings page can only make appointments only during their available times.

1. Click Staff in the left navigation pane. Remember, this refers to any of the people who will use your calendar.
2. Click Add new staff in the upper left of the staff page.
3. Add information about your staff member on the Staff details page.
   1. Add your staff member’s Initials and choose a color for their personal icon on the right. This will make their bookings easy to identify at a glance in the Bookings calendar.
   2. Type your staff member’s name in Add people. If they have a Chapman email address, they will appear as an auto-suggestion as you type.
   3. If you want someone to be reachable by phone, add the phone number where they can be reached. Remember that this phone number will be visible on your Bookings page, so we recommend extreme caution regarding use of any personal telephone numbers or other contact information. You can leave this field blank.
   4. Assign your staff a user role. You can choose from three options:
      1. Administrator: can edit all settings, add and remove staff, and create, edit, and delete bookings. This role should be assigned to whoever you want to manage the calendar for everyone. This person will be able to change appointments, update availability and time off, update services, etc.
      2. Viewer: can see all the bookings on the calendar. They can’t modify or delete them. They have read-only access to the settings.
      3. Guest: can be assigned to bookings but they can’t open the Booking mailbox. There is no option to allow anyone to edit just their own appointments; administrators can manage all activity in the calendar, while the other two roles have no editing permissions at all. We recommend that you delegate the administrator role to one person, a TA or research assistant, for example, and avoid assigning multiple administrators to a calendar. This will prevent a lot of confusing activity and chaotic changes in complex schedules.
   5. Choose whether to notify staff by email about new bookings or changes to bookings. We strongly recommend that you enable this feature.
   6. Select whether to allow Office 365 activity to affect the staff member’s availability. This is useful only if they use an Office 365 (Outlook) calendar to manage their workday. If you enable this feature, the Bookings calendar will sync with their Office 365 calendar and prevent scheduling of conflicting bookings.
   7. Select whether to use the business hours you set up in the Business information screen as the hours your staff member is available for booking appointments. If you disable this setting, you will be able to define different hours for when people can schedule appointments with this staff member for any service. Remember that your business hours need to be wide enough to include all the hours any staff is available for appointments.
4. Click Save Changes at the bottom when you are finished.

You must always have at least one service defined in your calendar. Edit the default service Bookings has inserted for you to suit your purposes, then add more as necessary.

Remember to think carefully about your services. Your business might offer only one service, such as office hours, or you might define other services like exam reviews, lab demonstrations, office hours for specific courses if you have multiple sections, or makeup exams. You can define different time durations for each service, and assign specific staff to them, so think about the kinds of things students usually need to do in their appointments, how long these things take, and who the best people are for those assignments, if you have multiple people to take on the work.

1. Click Services in the left navigation pane.
2. On the Services page, you'll see the existing services listed. To add a new service, click on the "+ Add new service" button.
3. To edit the service, click the pencil icon.
4. To delete the service, click the trashcan icon.

1. In the "New service" dialog box that appears, enter the details for your new service: Enter a Service Name, such as Office hours or Academic advising.

2. Add a brief description of the service. Make sure it’s clear how each service you offer differs from others, so that visitors to your calendar know what to book.

3. Choose a default location. This is where people will be directed to go for their appointment when you are meeting them in person. For online appointments, enter Teams Meeting.

4. Enable/disable Add online meeting. This will create a join link for a virtual meeting in Microsoft Teams in the booking confirmation. Teams is the easiest way to use Bookings for virtual meetings, so we recommend that you do so. If you prefer Zoom, leave this disabled and add your Zoom location to the Location field. We recommended that you create a Zoom location for each service and limit access during active appointments for privacy.

5. Choose a default duration for appointment.

6. If you enable the Buffer time your customers can’t book setting, you will be able to choose a duration either before or after your meeting (or both) during which the staff member’s time can’t be booked.
Note: Buffer time gives you and your staff time to regroup between appointments and allows some time for appointments that run long, so we recommend enabling buffer time as a sanity saver.

7. Enable/disable Let the customer manage their booking. This allows the student or colleague booking the appointment to manage it themselves.
Note: if you disable this option, be sure to include a note in the confirmation email letting people know that if they want to make changes, they will need to contact you or a staff member to do so. Be aware that if you do allow students to manage their own appointments, all calendar users will need to be vigilant about monitoring for last-minute changes.

8. Set the Maximum number of attendees per event. For services like academic advisement that require privacy you can limit this to one attendee. For exam review sessions or labs, you can raise this limit to whatever maximum number you think can be reasonably managed at one time.

9. Leave Default price set to Price not set.

10. In Notes, include any information internal users might find useful about the scheduling policy, the purpose of the service, privacy considerations, etc.

11. You can choose whether to display the following Custom fields on the booking page:

1. Customer email
2. Phone number
3. Customer address
4. Customer notes
   If you display these fields, anyone making an appointment for the service will be required to provide the indicated information. We recommend you select at least the Customer email field, so that staff has a convenient way to reach people about their appointments.

12. Add text for automatic reminders about the appointment at the intervals you prefer. We recommend including at least one reminder one day before the appointment. Be sure to include a reference to the specific service the student booked. Add additional information for the email confirmation. Using Teams for virtual appointments is most convenient, and a link to the Teams location will be included in the email confirmation, but if you are using a shared Zoom meeting space for your appointments for this service, you can add the information for accessing that space here, or just say “our staff will contact you with Zoom location information prior to your appointment.”
Note: Remember to not include information for individual Zoom accounts if more than one person can be booked for a service!

13. The person scheduling the appointment will receive an email that includes your message, and a link to the Teams meeting location if you are using Teams.

14. Enable Show this service on the booking page. You only want to disable this if you are defining a service that is only offered only periodically, such as an exam review session. This setting makes it convenient to use the same service multiple times; all you need to do is adjust the available times and re-enable this display setting for each exam review, for example.

15. You can use the default scheduling policy defined on the Bookings Page settings or choose a policy that applies only to this service. Defining a scheduling policy allows you to refine the parameters that restrict how services are booked.

1. Time increments: the duration for each increment of time during the available time for a service; in other words, if you are available for office hours from noon-3:00 p.m., setting the time increment for 30 minutes will give you a set of 30-minute appointments.
2. Minimum lead time: this will define the latest that someone can set or cancel an appointment for the service. If you offer lab tutorial time, but need to make sure there is opportunity for staff to set up a bench for the appointment, you might set this to sixty minutes so no one can schedule something only a couple of minutes before they show up.
3. Maximum lead time: if you only want to accept appointments for this service a certain period of time in advance, set this field as necessary.
   Notes:
   • If you define a new scheduling policy, you will also be able to choose options for sending email notifications or booking specific staff for just this service.
   • You will also be able to set different availability for a service during a certain date range, which is useful for blocking out times lab space is unavailable, for example.

16. Assign staff to the service by clicking their name on the right. Selected staff will be highlighted in gray and have a checkmark next to their name.

17. Click an assigned staff member to remove them from the service.

18. Click Save. Your defined services will all appear on the Services screen. Your bookings page will also display them for people to select when setting appointments, as shown in the screenshot below.

 

The Booking Page is where you set up what your external-facing booking page will look like. Once you customize and publish your booking page, people will use it to book appointments with you.

1. Click the Booking Page in the left navigation pane.
2. Configure booking page: Publish your calendar live to make your service bookable. Choose from the 3 options given: 1. Available to anyone 2. Available to people in your organization 3. No self-service
3. Booking page access control: choose whether to allow only visitors with a Chapman email to book appointments, and whether to hide your page so that it won’t appear on search engines like Google.
4. You do not need to use the Customer data usage consent fields because the University does not gather user data in Bookings.
5. Set up a default scheduling policy for all the services you offer. Remember that if you want to apply specific policies to some services, you can do so on the service details screen.
6. Customize your page: Choose colors and logos that appear on the Self-Service page, such as for brand consistency.
7. Make sure the selected time zone is correct for you and your staff. Setting the correct time zone is critical for virtual meetings, so do not skip this field.
8. When you are finished, click Save and Publish in the upper-left corner.
9. The status box will update to the option you selected, and you now have a URL to share with your students and colleagues. Add this URL anywhere you know people will look for your contact information.     

In your Bookings page, on the left navigational pane, click Calendar.

If you have many Staff added to the Staff tab for your Bookings page, you will see all their calendars in this centralized location.

1. Go to the date of the Appointment by clicking the left and right arrows or clicking on the date to get a view of a calendar.
2. Once on the date of the appointment, click to open the appointment. Click on Edit next to the pencil icon. You can manually Cancel an appointment in this area too. 
3. You may need to pass along an appointment and you can do that by selecting any other Staff member on this list. By doing so, the appointment will be scheduled with another staff member and the end-user will still be assisted. Once you select an alternate staff member, clickon Update Booking to finish the process.