Appointment Sign-Up Workflow

Hi MPU,

I have checked several threads in MPU about this. I’m curious if anyone has updates. Looking for a way to have people sign up for available appointment slots (instead of me manually doing it). I just want people to see my “appointment calendar”, pick a time slot and fill in and notify me.

I know that WhenWorks and Calendly do this already

Are there any other options for this, through Google, Fantastical or any other solutions?

Thank you!

Office 365 has a feature called Bookings that can do this.

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If you are in the Googleverse, then it’s very easy to do this in your Google Calendar.

https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/190998?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en#zippy=

I use this and it works great.

It’s only available for school and work accounts, though.

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A quick followup: I just checked to see if appointment slots availability is at all restricted by tier on “work” accounts.

Good news: it isn’t. I have the lowest-level tier for Google Workspace, with a single user. Appointment slots are available to me. :+1:

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Have been using Calendly for years.

Thanks for letting me know about Bookings! Our IT department wouldn’t let me link calendly (or other external services), but I was able to set up bookings since it was automatically baked in! Bit over the top for what I needed, but once I got it set it looks like it will work great.

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Would you please let us know to what extent Bookings works with your Outlook calendar? Would it allow clients to “see” your availability, book a slot, and have that then automatically entered into your Outlook calendar? I’m assuming your situation is all in on MS Office?

Also – Calendly lets one setup “interview-type” questions, that must be answered in advance, to give one an idea of what queries might be raised in the actual appointment. Does Bookings have something similar?

I found Bookings to be very similar to Calendly. Bookings interfaces with your Office 365 calendar, and lets your client “see” your availability via time slots they can book. You can configure availability in your settings, such as the amount of time you want to buffer between appointments, how much time you want for a slot, how far in advance someone can book, which hours you want to allow, etc. It does let you fine-tune things pretty well, so you’re not just giving free access to any opening on your calendar. And yes, you can put in a form with different fields that must be answered when someone is booking a time.

Cheers for this! I went and had a look again – found this YT video to be quite a good guide – and remembered what put me off of using it last time.

Whilst we’re all in on Outlook – and Bookings would then be free and matches virtually everything on offer that Calendly has, two features are still missing, as far as I can tell?

1.) Calendly’s shortened booking URL;
2.) Calendly’s “offline” integration with Outlook.

I.r.o. of 1.), my booking URL is www.calendly.com/MyName – which is very easy to remember, and I’m fairly certain means that people can find me easier, without having to go and look-up my booking details somewhere. The Booking’s appointment URL, whilst also being readily available to being copied/inserted into my email signature/webpage etc., is still not something anyone will remember, which will force a lookup, if they don’t already have it.
That said – not really sure how important this is – since most probably need to lookup in any event, but still…

I.r.o. 2.), Calendly has a very useful Outlook “add-in”, which sees me being able to add a series of meeting times into the email message directly, as clickable links. This is particularly useful when I am emailing the person I want to meet with first, as opposed to them initiating the meeting.
Bizarrely, MS doesn’t appear to have a Bookings add-in available – which means that much of this functionality (if even possible), would have to be managed from the browser side, which I would prefer not to have to do. Simply put, I live inside Outlook the app, not Outlook the browser – so this is quite a hindrance to me.

So… so close, but not quite… Have popped this up as a feature request. Hopefully MS comes to the party!

Regardless, thanks again!

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