Purpose
Bookings can be customized for faculty and staff to manage their office hours by allowing others to book appointments or timeslots.
Video Tutorial
Explanation
- Log in to Bookings.
- Create your service by clicking on Services on the left navigation.
- Click Add new service at the top.
- Enter the name and description of your service.
- Both will be visible on your Bookings site.
- Enter a default location and choose whether you would like a Teams meeting to be generated by selecting Add online meeting.
- Choose the default duration, and then choose if you want to add buffer time before or after each booking slot as shown below.
- Scroll down and set the following:
- Choose the number of attendees that can book each appointment slot. Generally, this will be set to 1 for Office Hours appointments.
- Price – skip this option.
- Notes (internal only) – these are internal notes for you on this service. Generally, this will be blank for Office Hours appointments.
Note: "Let customers manage their appointment when you booked it…" applies only when you book someone in your Bookings calendar (not the self-service tool). Unless you are doing this, you can leave it.
- "Custom fields" allow you to collect information when someone is booking this service.
- Click the Modify button to edit these fields: Customer Information fields show in dark gray if selected/shown and can be marked "required" by selecting the slider.
- It is recommended you keep the email required and enable the phone number, as shown below.
- If you want to collect additional information or ask questions, you can use the "+ Add a custom field" option.
- Enter your question and then use the arrows to determine the order of the questions.
- Click on Save Changes.
- Enable text message notifications by selecting notification and checking the option.
- This is currently included in our Bookings plan and only works if you enable the "phone number" field above.
- Slide the box for "Show this service on the booking page".
- Email Notifications:
- We recommend unchecking the "Notify the business via email…" option when only one user is assigned to the Bookings Calendar (generally true during Office Hours).
- We recommend enabling "Send a meeting invite to the customer, in addition to the confirmation email".
- Next, set what reminders you want enabled for your service. Select Add an email reminder.
- You can add as many of these by selecting the time, setting reminders, and customizing the text in your reminders.
- You can also add reminders to the staff member who is assigned the booking.
- Add any additional information you would like included in the service email confirmation.
- To set custom scheduling policies, uncheck the box that states, "Use the default scheduling policy".
- Navigate to "Assign Staff".
- This box can be left unchecked since only one Staff member is assigned to the service.
- Next, select the following by navigating to "Availability options":
- Time increments: Determines the available times displayed.
- For example, if you choose 5 minutes, all available times will appear on 5-minute marks: 1:00, 1:05, 1:10, etc.
- Minimum lead time (hours): How far in advance can someone book time on your calendar.
- Maximum lead time (days): How far into the future can someone book this service.
- Availability: You have three options here:
- Bookable when staff is free: This will keep your Bookings service open indefinitely, subject to the lead time settings you have set above.
- Not bookable: This keeps your Bookings service unavailable. You can add a specific date range below under "+ Set different availability for a date range".
- Custom hours (recurring weekly): This allows you to set specific available hours for this service. Helpful for office hours that repeat at the same time every week.
- Below is a sample of the scheduling policy options for reference:
- Click on Save Changes.
- Change to the "Booking Page" tab in Bookings, then set the following:
- Select Business Page Access Control > choose the triangle dropdown > select available to people in your organization (this allows anyone at UTD, including students, to book).
- Check the "Disable Direct search engine indexing of booking page", as shown below.
- Your Bookings link will appear. Copy and paste into eLearning, email, or other communication tools.
- Click Save.
