Using Microsoft Bookings for room/desk bookings

Microsoft Bookings is designed generally to be used for booking "services" with "staff" (e.g. 1-1 consultations with a human). However it can also be used to book rooms by setting up booking periods (e.g. 1 hour) as "services", and each room as "staff".

You'll create a booking page, which can have multiple rooms associated with it.

Creating the booking page

1. Go to https://outlook.office.com/bookings/
2. Click "Create booking page"
3. Click "Create from scratch"
4. Name your calendar e.g. "Music Practice Rooms", and set some default hours. (Different rooms can have different hours later on). Click next.
5. Invite any staff members that need to have access to this calendar behind the scenes. For each staff member, add them and then change them to "Administrator". Click next.
6. For "Set up a service", click "Change". This is your first booking type, e.g. a half hour booking - you can add other booking types/durations later. Edit any settings you might want to. It's suggested to untick "Teams meeting". Click "Update service" then "Next".
7. Restrict it to "People in my organisation" and click "Create".
8. Wait and then click "Get started". This is where the bookings will show.
9. Click on the "Booking page" tab on the left.
   1. Open "Default scheduling policy" and change this to the standard / most common booking policies with the options. All of these can be overridden for individual booking types.
   2. It's recommended to add e.g. Christmas and term breaks using "Set different availability for a date range", entering the dates, and then selecting "Not bookable"
10. Click on the "Staff" tab on the left. To ensure administrators can't be booked in like rooms, for each person you added as an administrator earlier:
    1. Edit their listing.
    2. Untick "Notify the staff member..."
    3. Untick "Events on calendar affect availbility"
    4. Untick "Use business hours"
    5. Press the trash can (delete) icon next to each day, so it ends up showing "Closed" for all days. 
11. Go to "Business information" tab on the left.
    1. Provide the information in "Basic details".
    2. For Privacy Policy, provide https://studentsunionucl.org/data-protection-and-privacy-policy 
    3. Add logo if desired.
12. Add rooms as below.
13. Add services as below.

Adding a room

1. Rooms are "staff", so go to the "Staff" tab.
2. Click "Add new staff"
3. In "Search for people or groups", enter the name of the room, e.g. "Music Practice Room 1". Click "Use this name: " to add it.
4. Enter initials for it, e.g. MP1
5. For e-mail, enter a unique e-mail address ending in @studentsunionucl.org. For instance, you might do [email protected]. This does not need to be a real e-mail address and will not need to be accessed or used in any way.
6. Uncheck "Notify staff member..."
7. Customise hours if needed by unchecking "Use business hours".
8. Save. 
9. Always test your updated booking setup to make sure it works.

Adding booking duration options

1. Durations are "services", so go to the "Services" tab.
2. Click "Add new service"
3. Select options as needed on the "Basic details" and "Availability options" tabs. Key is the "Duration" field.
4. On the "Assign staff" tab, select each of the rooms that that duration should be available for. 
5. On "Custom fields" tab, make sure "Customer e-mail" is selected. Because they will be logged in, you will get their name etc anyway, so you don't need any other fields. You can however capture custom information for the booking if needed by adding custom fields on this tab.
6. On the "Notifications" tab:
   1. It is strongly recommended to turn off "Notify the business...".
   2. You can provide information, e.g. links and extra info, that will be sent to the booker.
   3. You can also enable reminder emails.
7. Save. 
8. Always test your updated booking setup to make sure it works.