Microsoft Bookings
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How to Create Office Hours Service in Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Bookings is a program for customer service. Due to a variety of applications, Bookings have a number of configurations. Microsoft 365 Education is not a system of Linux type. Therefore, there are many administrative accounts of different level. In particular, there are such accounts for Bookings. I think that for Universities the best way to administrate Bookings is to choose a restrictive list of staff to manage Bookings' pages for faculties and departments. It is important to keep in mind that the number of teachers on one page shouldn't be too big. Otherwise, it will be difficult for students to find their teachers. By default, the Global Administrator owns a special Calendar for Bookings. She or he may also delegate administrative rights to any user with the A3 license. In our univerisity our Global Administrator of Microsoft 365 Education A3 created a Bookings' Calendar for our New School of Economics and gave me administrative rules in it. I am going to explain here how I configured Bookings for our school. First, let us see how it works!
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How to book a consultation?
A student opens the Bookings tab in Teams and finds her or his teacher, a time slot, indicates student's data and presses a reservation button. Then the teacher receives a confirmation mail to his outlook, and the program reserves a booked slot of time in teacher's Calentar in Teams. There will be a number of reminders to both, which is determined by the administrator. In my case, I fixed three of them. In right time, both enter their meeting through the Calendar.
Open Bookings' tab
Chose a teacher, date and time
Enter data and reserve
Teacher gets an email warning
The consultation appears in Teacher's Calendar
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How to Configure Bookings?
Global Administrator opens "Settings" in the Administrative Center of Microsoft 365 Education A3 or A5 and turns Bookings on. After that she or he creates calendars for departments. When the Global Administrator created a calendar for New School of Economics, "НОЦМЭ", I signed in to my corporative account in https://www.office.com and opened "Bookings". For the first entry the system gave me a choice of calendars available and I clicked on "НОЦМЭ." The system redirected me to Bookings front page of our department. The left panel of this page lists sections to be filled in. The Gallery below illustrates these sections from the bottom to the top. In "Business Information" I entered "НОЦМЭ", the email of Global Admin in the field "Send customer replies to", Satbayev University in "Business type" and the code for the local currency KZT, although it iptional since this service is free. I also indicated business hours from 8:00 AM to 9:00 PM, since this time interval covers all possible office hours. At the very bottom of this section, one can upload the logo of the department if it exists. You skip the section "Services" at this stage and fill in the section "Staff." Here you may add faculty members using "+" at the top of this section. Notice, that the only role you may assign to them is the role of viewers. I enter my email address to the second field on the left, chose the color of my icon and remove a check mark near "Use business hours" to make the Calendar below accessible for scheduling office hours. Using two buttons "x" and "+" I fix my office hours which I split into four 15-minutes slots. To complete I put a check mark under "Email notifications" and press the "Save" button at the very top of this window. I repeat this for every faculty member.
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How to configure Bookings?
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Click on "НОЦМЭ"
Bookings Front Page
Buiseness Information
Item title
Add Staff
Item title
Office Hours Appointment
Turn on email notification
Butakovka
How to fill in the Booking Page?
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I press "Booking Page" and select the background color. It is better to remove the check mark near "Require a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 accounts." Leave the check mark near "Display business logo" if you want to show it on the Booking Page. I selected 15 minutes in "Times increments" of Scheduling policy since in my Office Hours, I plan to have 15 minutes per student. Minimum lead time is set 24 hours to forbid late enrollments. Maximum lead time of 30 days is default. In the third part of the Booking Page I keep check marks in the email notification box and in the staff box. The only important thing in the availability pane is that scheduled office hours are in the limits indicated here.
Booking Page (left)
Booking Page (right)
The second part of the Booking Page
The second part of the Booking Page
Booking Page, Part III.
Booking Page, Part III.
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In the "Services" section I click on the grey strip. A new window appears. I follow down this window leaving most of the fields as they are. In "Service details" I press "Copy" and paste the URL of my Booking site to Word. In "Service name," I enter the title and description. I turned on "Add online meeting" to provide to run meetings in Teams. In the Duration field, I chose 15 minutes. In the custom field, I fix three reminders and confirmations. In "Assign Staff" I put check marks in the fields of all people, which will have office hours in this particular service. There are possibilities to add other services at the top of the "Services Page." I press "Save" and return to the "Survices page." This completes the configuration. I send the URL of the Booking site to all teaches involved.
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Manage Services
Service details
Service Name
Custom field
Publishing Options
Assign Staff
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How to add Bookings to Teams?
A teacher opens his class in Microsoft Teams and presses "+" at the top pane with the list of tabs.