Using the Outlook Booking with Me Feature

I've spent some time investigating why the calendar owner is not notified of the intent, or otherwise, of the person booking the meeting to attend when the RSVP.

The reason seems to be simply that when the Book With Me system sends the ICS file, the flag ISRESPONSEREQUESTED is set to FALSE.

The result of this is that any status set in the calendar of the person requesting the meeting is not sent to the calendar of the person whose time was booked.

This means that:

• the person who advertised their booking page does not know if the person who made the booking intends to join the meeting
• if the person booking the meeting changes their mind and declines the meeting, they believe that they have notified the other party and feel upset when the other party questions why they didn't join the meeting
• the person who advertised their booking page is left waiting for a number of minutes before abandoning a no-show meeting
• The meeting slot could have been freed up when the declined RSVP was spotted by the calendar owner, thus allowing another person to book that time-slot (improving efficiency)

After investigating this with Microsoft 1st line support, I have been informed that this is "by design".  It feels like it is actually "by omission" and it would be great if the developers could make a change to set the flag to TRUE.

TonyRedmond  I have just started using the bookwithme feature and in general I like what I see. However, a few observations by way of feedback.

1) A private link seems to be to only one type of meeting and does not also show public meetings.  I was expecting to see the ability to also display public meeting types via this link.  The scenario being I may want to offer the ability to a close associate or a VIP to book a longer meeting with me. However, I also want that VIP to be able to have the option of booking the sort of shorter meetings (with shorter lead times) that I might offer publicly in case they want to schedule a brief discussion with me.  Yes I could send them both public and private links but that is cumbersome.  I'd like to see the ability to build a menu of meeting types from a combined pool of public and private types and be able to generate a private link to that combined menu page.  At the very least I would like to see an option box to show public meetings from a private link. 

2) The meeting type descriptions have no scroll bars or other means of seeing a longer description until after the meeting is booked.  A longer description is very helpful because I might for e.g. offer a 20 meeting with no guarantee of video at a 2 hour  lead time (as I may not be in a position to be set up with video with only 2 hours notice) but I may want to offer a 20 minute meeting with guaranteed video but with a 12 hour lead time. Explaining the difference between these options takes more characters than that allowed at the meeting type selection point which is where it is most helpful.  The full text is shown on the manage meeting page but by then they may well have selected the wrong type of meeting. 

3) Some sort of editable text header to the page would be very useful.  This might say for example that meetings might be possible to arrange further into the future or for longer than than this page allows on a case by case basis - please email XYZ to arrange a bespoke appointment.

4) Vanity URL's.... or is it possible to put the page in an iframe.  The native URL is way too long to put on a business card or to read out on a voicemail message: either your own in the sense of Hi this is XYZ, I am sorry I can't take your call right now, please feel free to visit my bookings page at XYZ.com/MeetNicholas and select a time of your convenience  or to leave a message on someone's voicemail saying Hi I'd like to speak to you please visit my page at XYZ.com/MeetNicholas and pick a time of your convenience.