Creating a booking form

[ATiRubyfan]

Hello all!

I was wondering if someone can help me with how to create this.

Let's say I would like a bunch of people to confirm their availability at certain times. They visit a webpage, enter their name and save the form. The next person comes and has to choose a new slot as they cannot double book a slot. A booked slot will be grayed out or simply not show up.

e.g.
MON---TUES---WED---THURS---FRI
9AM
10AM
11AM
12PM

I have been fiddling with Office 365 Lists and Office Bookings but have not quite achived this.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[BinnsY]

This should do what you need;

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/business/scheduling-and-booking-app

Unfortunately it's not free but if you already have some investment in 365 it might not be that expensive for you. We've used it at work for things like after work events, it can even integrate with teams automatically creating teams meetings as bookings are made with the selected person they are visiting and the booker.

 

[thenewoc]

You should be able to do this in MS Bookings...

Start off in Bookings and create a new calendar. I suggest you use a naming convention here such as <your_chosen_name>_bookings_calendar. Unfortunately the oddity of how MS have set things up they use this as your business name but you can change this later after the calendar has been created. Once the calendar is created you can go into it from the Bookings homepage, select 'Business information' and change your 'Business name' to what it actually should be rather than the calendar name so that your business name shows in the various places on the 'Booking page'.

Ensure you're using the new bookings format as it has a different api to the previous one and also allows you to have a mix of services that are either 1:1 bookings or 1:many attendees. The default service that is generated for you during the calendar creation process is a 1:1 type service and I don't think it gives you the option for it to be anything else. Not to worry as you can create new services once the calendar has been created and then delete the original service if necessary. I say if necessary as once you create a service that only specifies 1 attendee then you can't change it later. Therefore if you think you might want more than one attendee it's best to set that option to at least 2.

Probably best to set your business hours in the 'Business information' section of the calendar settings. You can set up multiple available time ranges per day so in effect you can prevent a range of time over lunch from being bookable. Then whoever you add as a staff member will allow Bookings to figure out if a time slot is free if it isn't booked already in that persons calendar(s?). If all these people should only be making their appointment with 1 specific person then that's the easiest because you can add just that one person as a Staff member of the service and turn off the option in the 'Booking page' section under 'Default scheduling policy' > uncheck 'Allow customers to choose a specific person for the booking'.

Set your slot duration in the Services options and consider setting a 'Buffer time' after the appointment. The available slots will adjust themselves automatically to account for buffers once the slots start to be snuffled up. In the Services options you can also decide whether this is going to be conducted at a real location or to have an online Teams meeting for it.

 

[ATiRubyfan]

You should be able to do this in MS Bookings...

Start off in Bookings and create a new calendar. I suggest you use a naming convention here such as <your_chosen_name>_bookings_calendar. Unfortunately the oddity of how MS have set things up they use this as your business name but you can change this later after the calendar has been created. Once the calendar is created you can go into it from the Bookings homepage, select 'Business information' and change your 'Business name' to what it actually should be rather than the calendar name so that your business name shows in the various places on the 'Booking page'.

Ensure you're using the new bookings format as it has a different api to the previous one and also allows you to have a mix of services that are either 1:1 bookings or 1:many attendees. The default service that is generated for you during the calendar creation process is a 1:1 type service and I don't think it gives you the option for it to be anything else. Not to worry as you can create new services once the calendar has been created and then delete the original service if necessary. I say if necessary as once you create a service that only specifies 1 attendee then you can't change it later. Therefore if you think you might want more than one attendee it's best to set that option to at least 2.

Probably best to set your business hours in the 'Business information' section of the calendar settings. You can set up multiple available time ranges per day so in effect you can prevent a range of time over lunch from being bookable. Then whoever you add as a staff member will allow Bookings to figure out if a time slot is free if it isn't booked already in that persons calendar(s?). If all these people should only be making their appointment with 1 specific person then that's the easiest because you can add just that one person as a Staff member of the service and turn off the option in the 'Booking page' section under 'Default scheduling policy' > uncheck 'Allow customers to choose a specific person for the booking'.

Set your slot duration in the Services options and consider setting a 'Buffer time' after the appointment. The available slots will adjust themselves automatically to account for buffers once the slots start to be snuffled up. In the Services options you can also decide whether this is going to be conducted at a real location or to have an online Teams meeting for it.

I played around with Bookings for a while before I got what I needed.
But, I still can not find an option to show only specific available dates. I can delete days of the week and make the rest as recurring days. But, this resulted in people not choosing the specific dates I wanted.
e.g. If I have booking slots for 30th April and 1st May only, I have to enable recurring days so that every future weekend is now available. People then book slots on future weekends!

 

[thenewoc]

I played around with Bookings for a while before I got what I needed.
But, I still can not find an option to show only specific available dates. I can delete days of the week and make the rest as recurring days. But, this resulted in people not choosing the specific dates I wanted.
e.g. If I have booking slots for 30th April and 1st May only, I have to enable recurring days so that every future weekend is now available. People then book slots on future weekends!

If you go into the bookings calendar and then choose the 'bookings page' option, under 'Default scheduling policy' you can add 1 to many blocks of date ranges by clicking 'Set different availability for a date range' and make these non bookable.

or

If your service is not using your default online scheduling and availability policy because you are over riding it by setting it specifically on a service itself then you can do the same thing by adding 1 to many date ranges on the service 'Availability options' that also override the derived availability on the associated staff member(s) providing the service.