Microsoft Bookings is a robust online scheduling tool with the M365 tenant that supports the calendaring needs of faculty and staff who wish to manage their time and connect with others.
Use Bookings as an alternative to the manual scheduling and maintenance of calendars. Bookings provides the convenience of self-service through a customizable webpage that assists users with finding available times and booking/managing appointments.
Instructors can use Bookings for providing their availability for things like office hours, academic advising appointments, tutoring, etc., and allow students to book appointments with them.
Staff can use Bookings to provide their availability to both internal and external colleagues and allow them to schedule a time for a meeting or event. Staff may also find Bookings to be an appropriate solution for reserving equipment. Bookings should not be used to book space on campus.
Bookings can be integrated with your Outlook calendar and Microsoft Teams.
Note: Bookings was designed to support an organization where one or more individuals offer one or more services. The tool was primarily developed for use by small businesses as opposed to academic institutions. Therefore, the language used within the application differs slightly from that of University verbiage.
Bookings is included in Princeton's Microsoft portal and is available to Princeton users with an Exchange account. Users must be signed into the Microsoft portal with their unique Princeton NetID and Password. Unfortunately, Bookings is not a viable solution for users with Gmail accounts.
Please note: You do NOT have to have access to the Bookings application to successfully book time on someone's calendar. The shared URL is accessible to anyone within the Princeton community.
Bookings is available to all Princeton University faculty and staff (Exchange/Outlook) users as part of the Office365 Suite. Log in to Princeton’s Microsoft Portal (portal.office.com) with your Princeton NetID and Password.
Bookings may be accessed from the list of available applications within the portal. If the Bookings icon does not appear on the left navigation menu or the main app screen, you may need to click the All Apps tab.
General Support | IT ServiceDesk | servicedesk@princeton.edu 609-258-4357 (8-HELP) |
Microsoft Support | Microsoft Documentation | |
eLearning | LinkedIn Learning (available to all Princeton Users) | |
Quick Tutorial | Narrated Slideshow | |
SPOT Training | MS Teams Channel for Bookings | |
Bookings @ Princeton Website | Steps for configuration and maintenance of Bookings Calendars |
Important Naming Convention Considerations To avoid issues conflicts with duplicate names, do not name your Bookings Calendars with your NETID or Name as it appears in the University's Global Address Book. Please name your Booking Calendar appropriately to reflect the unique service(s) you intend to provide. We strongly recommend using the prefix "Bookings-". Example: Bookings-PACServices Note: When a Bookings calendar is provisioned, the name you give it is reflected in its URL and searchable in the Global Address Book. You can customize the appearance of the name on the front-end by changing your "Business Name". |
Caveats to Consider when Setting Up a New Service When setting up a new Service, ask yourself whether this Service is intended for a single-attendee or if multiple attendees should be able to book the same Staff member at the same time. This VERY IMPORTANT criteria is entered in the Services section in the Maximum Number of Attendees field. If a Service is created with two or more attendees in this field, the 'group' feature is enabled and the field will be available for editing in the future - though it cannot be transitioned to a 'single-attendee' Service. Likewise, if a Service is created for a single attendee, the group feature will remain disabled and cannot be edited in the future to enable the group feature (the number in this field can never be changed to more than "1"). |
Set Availability to Sync with Outlook The Bookings Calendar owner needs to enable “Bookable when Staff are Free” to sync Staff Outlook Calendar availability with Bookings. |
Cancel Appointments in Bookings, Not in Outlook Deleting a Bookings appointment from a staff member's Outlook calendar will not cancel it in Bookings. Users need to cancel the booking in Bookings instead, so that both the staff person and the customer who booked the appointment receive a cancellation notice. |
Add an Additional Administrator to Your Bookings Page That is Unbookable If you are unavailable to cancel your appointments, having an additional administrator on your Booking Page will allow them to cancel on your behalf. Make sure that for each of your available services you have yourself or whoever is available to be booked with for that service selected and not the additional person, so they cannot be booked with. If you do not select yourself or whoever else is available to be booked with, it will default to anyone. |
Set up Time Out of the Office in Bookings Bookings has trouble reading recurring time away from the office. When you/your staff intend to be away from the office for a duration of time, make sure the time is reflected in the Bookings Calendar. Tip: Select Calendar from the left navigation pane and click Time Off (located at the top) to schedule recurring time away. |
Set Your Business Hours to Reflect Unbookable Time From the Business Information section of the left navigation pane, set up your Business Hours to allow for time you/your staff should not be booked or show time as available (like lunch time, for example). |
Explore Access Levels
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Sharing a Calendar To share your Bookings Calendar, you need to first determine what you want the user/student to see.
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Deleting a Calendar To delete a Bookings Calendar, we ask that you do two things:
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Bookings is supported by the Office of Information Technology as part of the Microsoft portal and suite of applications. This is not the only application being used for calendars, however. Applications such as Google Calendar and Calendly are suitable (non-supported) options as well.
Please see https://bookings.princeton.edu for complete information on Bookings.