Setting up Microsoft Bookings for online appointments

The short answer

Microsoft Bookings comes with Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard and Business Premium, so check your plan before paying for a separate tool. Open it from the app launcher at microsoft365.com (or book.ms), create a shared booking page, then work through it in order: business hours, services (duration, buffer time, price), staff (leave the calendar free/busy setting ticked), the scheduling policy, and the confirmation emails. Turn on online meetings for anything virtual so each booking gets its own Teams link, then publish the page and put the link on your website. The steps below cover each screen.

What Bookings is, and the two kinds of page

Plenty of firms pay monthly for a separate booking tool while Microsoft Bookings sits unused in the same subscription. It's not that the setup is hard, exactly, but it's fiddly enough that it never quite gets done: which staff, which services, how long each takes, how far ahead people can book. It sits on the to-do list for months.

Bookings comes in two flavours and the names matter. Personal Bookings shares your own availability so people can grab time with you, a bit like a public diary. Shared Bookings creates a booking page for the business: services, prices, staff, business hours, the lot. A firm taking customer appointments wants a shared page, and that's what this guide sets up.

The mechanism is worth understanding before you start. A shared page gets its own calendar, stored as a shared mailbox in Exchange Online, not in anyone's personal diary. Bookings reads each staff member's Outlook calendar, only offers slots when they're actually free, then drops the confirmed appointment into their calendar and emails the customer. That calendar link is the whole value of the product, and it's also the thing most half-done setups get wrong.

1. Check your plan and find Bookings

Bookings is included in Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard and Business Premium, plus the enterprise (E1, E3, E5), frontline (F1, F3) and education plans, and in Teams Essentials and Teams Premium. If your firm's email runs on Microsoft 365, you almost certainly have it already.

Sign in at microsoft365.com, open the app launcher and select Bookings, or go straight to the short address below. It's also available inside Teams and Outlook: select the Apps icon on the left rail, search for Microsoft Bookings, select Add, then pin it so it stays put.

If Bookings is nowhere to be found, an admin may have switched it off for the organisation. Microsoft lets tenants disable it entirely, so ask whoever runs your 365 before assuming you don't have it.

https://book.ms

2. Create the shared booking page

On the Bookings home page, go to the Shared booking pages section and select Create booking page, then Create from scratch. The business name is the only required field; staff, services and who's allowed to book can all be filled in later. Work through to the end and select Create, because Microsoft warns your progress isn't saved if you quit partway.

Then open Business information in the left pane. Add your address, phone number and website, and set 'Send customer replies to' to an inbox somebody actually reads, because replies to confirmation and reminder emails are forwarded there.

Set your business hours on the same page. The default is 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, Monday to Friday, with times in 15-minute steps, and these hours cap every booking on the page, so get them right first. The + next to a day adds a second row, which is how you block out a gap: one row 8:00 to 1:00 and another 2:30 to 6:00 makes Thursday's standing staff meeting unbookable.

3. Add your services

Select Services in the left pane, then Add new service. The name and description are what customers see on the page; the duration is how long each booking blocks the calendar, starting from the slot the customer picks. A page holds up to 50 services, though most small firms need three or four.

Buffer time is the setting people miss. It adds minutes before or after each appointment that also show as busy on the staff calendar, so in Microsoft's own example a 10-minute buffer after a 3:00 pm finish keeps that person unbookable until 3:10. Use it for travel between jobs, writing up notes or resetting a room.

For price, pick one of the display options or 'Price not set', which shows no price or mention of cost at all. And for anything virtual, turn on 'Add online meeting': every booking then gets its own Teams meeting link with dial-in details, added to both calendars and to the confirmation and reminder emails automatically.

Assign the staff who can deliver each service, and decide whether customers pick a person by name or get whoever's free. Custom fields collect anything you need at booking time; the customer's email, phone, address and notes fields are built in and can be made optional but not removed. If a service isn't ready for the public, the Publishing options toggle hides it from the page without deleting it.

4. Add staff and set their hours

Select Staff, then Add new staff. Type a colleague's name and their details fill in from your Microsoft 365 directory; each person gets a role (Team member, Scheduler, Viewer or Guest, with Team member the usual choice for someone customers book).

Two tick boxes on this screen matter more than everything else combined. 'Events on Microsoft 365 calendar affect availability' is the free/busy link: with it ticked, a 3:00 pm meeting or dentist appointment in someone's Outlook removes their 3:00 pm slot from the booking page. It's on by default and Microsoft strongly recommends keeping it on to avoid double bookings. I'd go further: untick it and you don't have a booking system, you have a double-booking system. Tick the notify option too, so nobody finds out about an appointment by accident.

Working hours default to the business hours from step 2 (the 'Use business hours' box). For part-timers or anyone with a fixed pattern, untick it and set hours per day; the x next to a day marks it as a day off and + adds it back. You can add people from outside your organisation by typing their email address, but Microsoft notes they can't share free/busy information, so their other commitments will never block a slot. A page supports up to 100 staff.

Events on Microsoft 365 calendar affect availability   ->  leave ticked
Notify all staff via email when a booking assigned to them is created or changed   ->  tick

5. Set the scheduling policy and check the emails

Open the Booking page tab in the left pane and find the Scheduling policy section. Time increments set which start times customers are offered, anywhere from 5 minutes to 4 hours apart. Lead time in hours is the minimum notice for booking or cancelling, so nobody grabs the 9:00 am slot at 8:55. Maximum days in advance stops bookings landing absurdly far out (it accepts 365 days or more if you want that). Tick 'Notify when a booking is created or changed' to get an email to the business inbox for every booking.

Each service also has a Notifications page. Email confirmations, reminders and follow-ups can go to the customer, the staff member or both, at times you choose, and you can stack multiple reminders per appointment. There's a free-text box for extra information on the confirmation, which is the place for parking instructions, what to bring, or your cancellation terms.

Two caveats. Text message reminders need a Teams Premium licence and Microsoft says they're currently only available in North America, so UK firms should ignore that toggle. And confirmations are ordinary emails from your Microsoft 365 domain, so if your email authentication records aren't set up they can land in spam; https://lodesa.co.uk/library/spf-dkim-dmarc-setup covers fixing that.

6. Publish, share and test

Back on the Booking page tab, check the access options before you publish. 'Require a Microsoft 365 account from my organization to book' locks the page to your own staff, which is right for internal pages and wrong for customers. 'Disable direct search engine indexing' keeps the page out of Google and Bing so only people with the link can find it. Then select Save and publish.

You get a link you can share by email, embed in your website, or attach to a Book Now button on a Facebook page. Visitors see available times in their own time zone automatically, so a 1:00 pm slot in London shows correctly to someone booking from abroad.

Now test it like a customer. Open the link in a private browser window, book a real appointment, and check three things: the confirmation email arrives, the booking appears in the staff member's Outlook calendar, and the Teams link joins a meeting. Microsoft notes some setting changes take up to 10 minutes to apply, so give it that long before deciding something's broken. If you ever need to pull the page, Unpublish is on the same tab.

Where this gets hard

The wrong-calendar trap catches more firms than anything else. A shared booking page isn't anyone's diary; it's a separate mailbox and calendar living in Exchange Online, and staff only see appointments because Bookings invites them. Everything depends on the 'Events on Microsoft 365 calendar affect availability' box staying ticked and on staff keeping their Outlook calendars honest. Untick it, or add staff from outside your organisation (whose free/busy Bookings can't read at all), and the page will happily sell time people don't have. The first symptom is usually a customer in reception with nobody free to see them.

Availability is layered, and the layers don't explain themselves. A slot only appears when the business hours, the staff member's working hours, the service's availability and the scheduling policy all agree, and when a time you know is free refuses to show, Bookings won't tell you which layer is blocking it. The classics are a part-timer left on 'Use business hours', offering Fridays they've never worked, and a lead time set high enough that same-week appointments quietly vanish.

And there are two products wearing one name. Firms publish a personal page when they needed a shared one, then wonder where the services and staff went; meanwhile every shared page creates a mailbox that whoever manages your Microsoft 365 may not know exists, and admins can switch Bookings off tenant-wide, which is why it's sometimes simply missing. Untangling a half-built page, a mystery mailbox and a calendar that lies about availability is usually the point where the DIY attempt stops.

What you end up with

• Online booking included in the Microsoft 365 plan you already pay for, with no extra subscription
• Appointments that drop into the right person's Outlook calendar, with clashes blocked automatically
• Confirmations and reminders sent for you, and a unique Teams link on every virtual appointment
• A published page that respects your business hours, staff working patterns and notice periods

Facts on this page last checked 14 July 2026, against learn.microsoft.com.

Related fixes

If your booking page is half-built, double-booking people or still sitting on the to-do list, I'm happy to take a look and set it up properly against your real diaries.