What are Microsoft Bookings?
Microsoft Bookings is a quick and easy alternative to scheduling appointments with your customers over the phone and allows your customers to book appointments with your staff based on the services you offer and your staff availability. It provides businesses with a public-facing Web portal for customers to book appointments, while also providing staff access to a shared calendar for scheduling purposes. It is free for all DU faculty, students, and staff as part of the Office 365 Suite.
Key Features
How Microsoft Bookings works
License Plans & Pricing
Enterprises are unsure whether they want to stop using an existing spreadsheet or whiteboard by way of embracing anything new if the current system works. But here’s the good news: Basic pricing starts around @12.50 per month per user for a la carte access if you are already using Office 365 Premium or Microsoft 365 Business. Here's how you can differentiate between Microsoft 365 Enterprise vs Office 365 Enterprise.
Microsoft Booking is automatically activated for the following plans:
Microsoft 365 Business Standard
- Microsoft Business Premium
- Microsoft 365 A3
- Microsoft 365 A5
- Microsoft 365 E3
- Microsoft 365 E5
Additionally, Microsoft Bookings will be available for the following Enterprise plans, but will not be enabled by default:
- Office 365 Education A3
- Office 365 Education A5
- Office 365 Education A3
- Office 365 Education A5
So, roll out to other Office 365 subscriptions as Microsoft is only releasing this to Office 365 Business plans for limiting the potential no. of users using this feature until they feel it is mature enough to release to enterprise.
Comparison Analysis
Although many cloud-based applications are available out there for assisting enterprises overcome stress of booking customer appointments, managing employee’s workload and in establishing customer contact management systems. But now all those applications have competition from Microsoft as it announced the launch of Microsoft Bookings as part of a standard subscription to Office 365. A few prominent ones are.
Calendly
Calendly is an appointment and meeting scheduling software for business professionals and their clients and is also quite easy to use, fast, user-friendly, and you don't have to even sign-up and go through the process of having yet another login to remember. This tool allows you to schedule meetings in minutes with people outside of your organization. It's also amazing how it integrates with other calendars such as Google calendar and Outlook. But it is not integrated into one suite for even more ease of use especially doesn’t suit to businesses having different branches or for those who work remotely as they require to use digital invites more than ever.
Doodle
Doodles radically simplify the process of scheduling group events. The company initially became popular because of its group scheduling service on www.doodle.com that’s used by millions of people. Today, it also provides a personal scheduling profile (MeetMe) and a professional booking service for local service providers (BookMe). The business is based on online advertising and premium subscriptions.
Even though Doodle also stands out in the market, I would love it if the un-paid version of it allows me to access more features and give me more options to customize the background, fonts etc. as its free version is basic.
As we can see, Microsoft Bookings does not provide more or any fewer features than other competitors in the market. The difference is that businesses can access this new application from within Office 365 and will be charged no additional cost as it is being offered as a standard part of the Office 365 subscription package. This surely gives Microsoft a competitive advantage over other options especially when an enterprise is already an Office 365 customer. Apart from this, you have other added features with Microsoft Bookings as well which are not being offered by other options in the market like.
Roles for staff members
Why should I use Bookings?
Is Microsoft Bookings worth a try?
Microsoft Bookings is an extremely easy to use application and I’ve done my best to cover the important things and features in this review article. That said, although it wasn’t extremely hard to figure out but it’s clear there is a lot more that can be discovered-why there are so many training videos on it!
This application is a wonderful way of scheduling and synchronizing with your Outlook Calendar and I like how you can have it send automatic emails and reminders to customers. But what I just love the most is that it enables me to create services and allows me to define who can give which service. So, in short, it makes it easy for me to give the customers options for booking that do not interfere with their already compromised activities. Adding to this, another excellent feature which I love is that it lets me define the times in which a customer can make an appointment and cancel it.
I don’t have many complaints about this application as it of now as it saves my time, also gives customers or potential customers direct access to my calendar, allowing us to get notified on the appointments-totally optimizes the whole internal process for me.
But there is one thing I dislike about it which is that not everyone knows about this application and how it works. Although it is amazingly simple to use but since it is new in the market so when I attach a Bookings link with a message, many people still prefer to call instead of booking appointments on this application. Therefore, there is this one limitation, but Microsoft has a good roadmap to keep this functionality going forward and will overcome it.
Last Updated 2 weeks ago
