Forum Discussion
How to set up a booking with multiple staff?
Our office just switched to Office 365. I'm used to using calendar/booking software like Calendly etc.
I find it easier to send people a booking link than to try to coordinate between multiple people.
I need to send a booking link to an external customer but I need the available times to book to be where there is overlap between multiple staff members, and for when the booking is made, it alerts these multiple staff.
For instance, I am trying to set up a meeting with an external client, my boss, and myself. I want the external client to be able to only book times that my boss and I are both available, and when they book I want it to include both my boss and myself in the booking.
I tried to set up a booking and turned off the "choose staff" option, but instead of booking both of us, it only booked one of us.
Is it possible to do what I want to do in the MS booking app?
- aslanfrench and MitchS-SE
It appears that Bookings has addressed this multiple-agent (staff requirement), which we need. Try to replicate with these steps:
1) Go to your Bookings page
2) Choose the Booking you want to manage
3) Select Services, then edit
4) Choose "Assign staff"
5) Choose the individuals who need to be booked
Based on the public-facing page I see after adding multiple agents (teammates), this appears to show only those slots where all teammates are free.dougcaseyGreat job!
On the shoulder of the giant, allow me to put in detailed steps from my run today, March 2025.
- Go to your Bookings page
- Choose the Booking you want to manage
- Click "Services" on the left pane
- Select the service and then click "Edit service"
- Click "Assign staff"
- Select "Assign all of your selected staff for an appointment"
- In the Select Staff list, tick the individuals who need to be booked
- Save Change
Does this work properly for you with hours? For my 1-on-1 booking page it reflects my hours and appointments accurately. However when following these steps I always end up with a booking page that says appointments start at 5 or 6am regardless of having "Custom hours" or "Bookable when staff are free" (with 5/6am out of working hours) and end at 12:30pm.
The booking page says it's in ET but I do wonder if this is a time zone issue, everything should be ET though even with PT that wouldn't explain 5am.
Here's the new location for voting on the feature (no longer in uservoice)
Allow resources to be booked along with staff (or multi staff booking) · Community (microsoft.com)
aslanfrench I need the same functionality
- Any Update so far on the booking features that you can have multiple resources in one call. Please let us know .
- We have the same issue / same need. Did you ever find a solution?
CommGuy725 No!
looking for something similar to Calendly's Collective
https://help.calendly.com/hc/en-us/articles/223145867-Multi-person-scheduling-options-for-teams
- Agreed, Bookings needs a similar feature to "Collective" meetings. Microsoft - please add this feature ASAP.
aslanfrench When a customer books an appointment, I need the program to consider the availability of all three staff members assigned to that service. I have selected the three staff and disabled the option for the customer to choose the staff member but Bookings is just assigning to one staff member and we're resulting in conflicting scheduling.
Without the ability to consider multiple staff schedules, Bookings won't be usable for us. Surely there is a fix on the way, or someone has work-around. Surely?
- I'm in the same boat. The only solution I can think of is 1) Create an email group; 2) add users to that group; 3) consolidate calendars into that group's calendar; and 4) use the group to schedule the appointments. Not sure if it will work, but it's an idea.
- This feature still needs adding... it's such an obvious thing. Did this work around actually work?
I am also looking to do something similar, I have two meeting rooms that can be joined to one big meeting room by removing a removable wall. So our clients need to be able to book the 2 meeting rooms separately or as 1 joined meeting room.
But I think the only option is by creating a new calendar and then use microsoft flow to automatically copy every calendar item that is created in meeting room 1 or meeting room 2 to this new calendar and use this new calendar as the staff member for this.
Yes I tried this with a very complicated flow but I turned it off, it's just not the right way to handle it especially if meetings are rearranged.
- I have tried all the above and nothing has worked, adding staff to the services just allowes booking to be made to one of those staff if you stop customers from choosing that doesn’t make the booking for all staff members bookings will just choose one ... sending notifications to staff members it’s pointless i need automation.
Rhys_hill, sorry to hear it didn't work. I'm almost curious that as they add new features and updates they didn't break something undocumented that was working because they didn't know it worked because the developers never thought it'd be used that way. 😉 I find things like that happen ALL the time with software vs the real world.
Yes, it would be great if it worked (and was documented) for ALL to benefit.
Kreera_House, I'm working from a full-blown O365 install with global distribution and AAD with multiple levels of OUs. However, our internal IT department has selectively disabled/enabled elements (e.g. so far, I'm the only one on my team with Bookings admin access, everyone uses Teams, but we still can't really utilize Stream) based on balancing regional regulatory compliance (e.g. GDPR) with internal corporate policy (e.g. IPSEC or NDAs). As such, having pieces of the greater ecosystem "turned on/off" appears to be creating maddening interaction results. Lots of "what ifs" that seem to yield different results each time we try something out.
When you go into the service you can add staff by click/selecting that staff member. You can select as many staff members as you want and they should each receive notifications related to when that service is booked.
As you mentioned, I would deselect the option to have the attendee select a staff member so that neither of you is left out.
To be sure you are only booked for valid times when all staff are available, you need two things:
1) Each staffer needs to be using an Outlook/Office calendar linked to your staff member, and
2) Check this box on the staff members' configuration page - "Events on Office calendar affect availability" as this will only give the green light on the bookings page for times when all staff members are available. I believe this box is checked by default, just be sure it still is.- @Mitch
Is what you're talking about only the notifications though? What we were hoping for (which I doubt it used to do, even by accident) is to only offer appointment times when two+ specific staff are both available and for them both to be booked simultaneously under one booking. See Calendly's Collective Shared Event: https://help.calendly.com/hc/en-us/articles/360049411794-How-to-set-up-a-collective-shared-event
"Collective events let you host an event with another person and let invitees pick a time when you're all available simultaneously." MitchS-SE - Are you saying that when you assign multiple staff members to a service, they all get booked when a customer selects that service? That is not the intended behavior. The ability to assign staff members to a service serves the purpose of limiting the pool of available staff members to which Bookings will assign an appointment when you don't let the customer choose a specific staff member, which is helpful when you have a team where members have specialties. If you don't assign staff members to a service, then Bookings will pick from all staff members that you added to your Bookings site.
What we found in our experiments was that if we didn't assign any staff member, Bookings grabbed one that was available (whether next or random I couldn't tell), but yes, the combination of selecting multiple staff members along with disabling the registrant from being able to choose a staff member had the effect of notifying all staff members of the appointment.
Picking multiple staff members but enabling the registrant to choose a staff member simply narrowed their options. If the registrant didn't pick/specify, then everyone got the notice (default behavior of the code as above I figured).
My guess was that then left the individual "shop manager" to determine which or all staff members notified should assist the customer. Sort of a "cover your bases" attempt to have someone qualified for a specific service be available for the customer in the event a staffer assigned wasn't available as planned (e.g. time overrun, out sick, etc.).
This assumption is based on the background that Bookings was originally intended for small shop keepers like hair salons, or personal trainers, or the like where there was always a F2F element assumed. Now with the addition of group bookings and such, we've got major scope and feature creep - which I'm having to explore to fit our needs.I will admit that I'm finding out that there is quite a bit of disparity in what features are available in different regions worldwide as well as what behavior to expect with different levels of M365 vs O365 and SMB vs Enterprise deployments, so YMMV. We're using this to allow self-registration for B2C webinars where our staff member is the presenter/moderator for the group session, so we haven't attempted to use the multi-staff session live. I don't know if a recent update has broken my experience or not. If so, I'd like to know for future reference.
aslanfrench I don't think Bookings is capable of handling your scenario. You may want to take a look at FindTime (https://findtime.microsoft.com/) where you can send a poll suggesting multiple time slots to your customer. As long as you pick times that are available on both your and your boss's calendar, the customer's selection will then book all three of you.
You may also want to vote for this feature to be added to Bookings. It currently has 389 votes on UserVoice: https://outlook.uservoice.com/forums/314907-microsoft-bookings/suggestions/34994005-allow-appointments-with-multiple-staff-members 😃
