Microsoft Bookings and Virtual Appointments Rollout puts a working appointment-scheduling system in front of your customers, patients, students or clients using the Bookings application already included in most Microsoft 365 plans. IT Partner sets the tenant-level Bookings policy (who may create pages, naming, external sharing, staff consent), builds up to ten booking pages with you — staff, services, durations and buffers, scheduling policies, lead times, custom intake questions — turns on Teams meetings for the services that are remote, configures SMS confirmations and reminders where Microsoft offers them for your country and the staff member holds the license, applies your branding and embeds each page in your website or intranet, sets up the Virtual Appointments app in Teams and the Teams Premium queue view where you are licensed, pilots two pages with real staff, and hands over a staff training handout and an admin guide. Standard scope is one tenant, up to ten booking pages and up to 500 users; larger estates are quoted in writing. $3,950 fixed, quoted in writing before work begins, for about 2 weeks; Microsoft licenses — Microsoft 365 plans and Teams Premium where you choose it — are yours, through our CSP or from Microsoft.
Microsoft Bookings is the appointment-scheduling application inside Microsoft 365: a public or internal page where people pick a service, a staff member and a time, with the booking landing in the staff member's Outlook calendar and, for remote appointments, a Teams meeting created automatically. It is included with Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Business Premium, E3, E5, A3, A5, F1 and F3 at the time of writing, so most organizations already own it. The gap is rarely the license. It is that nobody has decided who may create booking pages, how they are named, whether they may be shared outside the organization, what a staff member's availability means when Bookings and Outlook disagree, and how a clinic, a counseling office, an admissions team or a customer-success group should structure services so that customers book the right thing with the right person. Left alone, Bookings produces a sprawl of test pages, each one a mailbox in Exchange Online, with inconsistent branding and staff who do not know they have been added. This engagement does the design and the build. We start at the tenant: the organization-wide Bookings settings (enabled for whom, naming policy, staff-consent requirement, restrictions on sharing pages outside the organization and on social-media sharing, the Bookings mailbox retention decision) and the Exchange Online mailbox policy that governs who can create a page. Then each booking page, up to ten in the standard scope: the staff and their roles, the services with duration, price display, location and buffer time before and after, the scheduling policy (time increments, minimum and maximum lead time, whether customers choose a staff member or the page assigns one, notifications), business hours and per-staff availability, custom intake questions (text and dropdown), and the confirmation and reminder emails. Services delivered remotely get the online-meeting toggle, which puts a Teams join link in the confirmation and on the staff calendar. Where you hold Teams Premium for the staff in question, we enable SMS confirmations and reminders for the countries Microsoft supports and the scheduled-queue view in the Virtual Appointments app; where you do not, the pages work without them and we say which features you would gain. The Virtual Appointments app in Teams is the staff-facing side of the same system. Schedulers see the day's appointments, join them, see when a customer is waiting in the lobby, and send a follow-up — with the basic view included in Microsoft 365 and the queue view, SMS, custom waiting room and appointment analytics requiring Teams Premium at the time of writing. We configure the app for the departments that use it and train the schedulers and the staff who take the appointments. If protected meetings, meeting templates or branding across all Teams meetings are what you are after, that is Microsoft Teams Premium Deployment and Meeting Protection, and the two engagements fit together: that one makes Premium do its job for internal meetings; this one puts Bookings and Virtual Appointments in front of the people who book you. Who this is for: organizations of roughly 25 to 1,000 seats on Microsoft 365 — clinics and practices, colleges and school districts, professional-services and financial-advice firms, public-sector front desks, HR and IT teams that take internal appointments, and sales or customer-success teams that want a scheduling link that stays inside Microsoft 365. Who it is not for: if the requirement is a contact center with call routing and agents, see Microsoft Teams Contact Center Implementation; if staff need two-way texting with customers rather than appointment reminders, see Texting for Microsoft Teams (SMS) Implementation; if Teams itself is not yet deployed, Microsoft Teams - Initial Planning and Setup comes first.
Kickoff with the page owners and the Microsoft 365 administrator. IT Partner inventories licenses, existing booking pages and the mailbox policy, confirms the Teams Premium position per department, and delivers the design document: tenant policy, the page list and per-page design.
Organization-wide Bookings settings and the Exchange Online mailbox policy applied. The two pilot pages built end to end: staff, services, policies, intake questions, branding, Teams meeting integration, SMS and the Virtual Appointments app where licensed.
Scripted test bookings on the two pilot pages from outside and inside the organization, remote joins from both sides, SMS where applicable, cancellation and reschedule flows, and the Outlook availability checks. Findings fixed and the per-page template adjusted.
The remaining pages built from the adjusted template, embed code placed with your web or intranet team, each page published to the agreed audience, and the Virtual Appointments app pinned for the schedulers.
Walkthrough session for page owners and schedulers, staff training handout and admin guide handed over, and closure on your approval. About 2 weeks of our work; the calendar depends on how quickly page owners confirm their services and staff.
For most organizations, yes. At the time of writing Bookings is included with Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Business Premium, E3, E5, A3, A5, F1 and F3. Business Basic and Exchange Online-only plans do not include it. We check your plans at intake and tell you which staff can be added to a page and which cannot.
Not for Bookings itself. Booking pages, Teams meetings for remote appointments, email confirmations and reminders, branding and embedding all work on the Microsoft 365 plans that include Bookings. Teams Premium is required for SMS text confirmations and reminders and for the scheduled-queue view, custom waiting room and analytics in the Virtual Appointments app. The license sits on the staff member assigned to the appointment, so a clinic can license its ten front-desk and clinical staff rather than the whole organization.
A design document; the organization-wide Bookings policy and the Exchange Online mailbox policy that controls who may create pages; up to ten booking pages with staff, services, buffers, scheduling policies, intake questions and notification text; Teams meeting integration for remote services; SMS where licensed and supported; branding and embedding in up to ten website or intranet locations; the Virtual Appointments app with the queue view where licensed; a two-page pilot with real staff; and a staff training handout, an admin guide and a walkthrough session.
$3,950 fixed for standard scope — one tenant, up to ten booking pages, up to 500 users — quoted in writing before work begins; you pay after you approve delivery. About 2 weeks: design in the first two days, the pilot pages built by day five, the pilot over days six and seven, the remaining pages and embedding over days eight and nine, and training and handover on day ten. More pages, several tenants or a multi-site program are quoted in writing. Microsoft licenses are separate and yours.
Yes. A public booking page is open to anyone with the link; they enter their name, email, phone and answers to your intake questions and receive a confirmation email with any Teams join link. For remote appointments the customer joins from a browser or the Teams app as a guest. You can also publish a page to your organization only, for internal services such as HR or IT appointments, in which case the booker signs in with their work account.
When SMS is enabled on a booking page and the assigned staff member holds Teams Premium, the customer receives a text confirmation at booking and a reminder before the appointment, with the Teams link where the service is remote. Microsoft supports mobile numbers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia at the time of writing; numbers outside those countries receive email only. Group appointments do not send SMS. We test with a mobile number in your country during the pilot.
One per department, service line or location in almost every case. A page is a shared calendar with its own staff list, services and policies, and each page is a mailbox in Exchange Online; a page per person produces dozens of mailboxes with inconsistent settings and a confusing customer experience. A counseling office, for example, runs one page with its counselors as staff and its session types as services, lets the customer pick a counselor or have one assigned, and uses buffers so sessions never run back to back. We design the page list with you before building anything.
It is the staff-facing side of Bookings inside Teams. Schedulers and staff see the day's appointments, join a remote one with a click, see when the customer has arrived in the lobby, and send a follow-up. The basic view is included with Microsoft 365. With Teams Premium the app adds a scheduled-queue view across the department, a custom-branded waiting room, SMS and appointment analytics. We configure it for the departments in scope and pin it for schedulers through the Teams app setup policy.
Two controls, and we set both. The organization-wide Bookings settings let you scope who may use Bookings, require a naming policy for new pages, require staff to consent before they are added, and block sharing of pages outside the organization or on social media. The Exchange Online mailbox policy controls who can create a Bookings mailbox at all. Together they mean the pages that exist are the ones you designed, with names people recognize.
If the page is set to use staff availability from Outlook, busy time blocks the slot and the customer is offered another time or another staff member. Bookings reads Exchange Online calendars only; a calendar kept elsewhere is invisible to it. The training handout covers keeping calendars current and marking time off, because a stale calendar is the usual cause of a double booking.
Bookings can display a price for a service but does not take payment, and it holds booking details in the page mailbox rather than a CRM. Organizations that need payment at booking generally keep a payment step on their own website before or after the appointment, and those that want bookings to create leads use a Power Automate flow from the Bookings appointment event into Dynamics 365 or another system. Both are outside this fixed price and quoted separately; we say so at the scoping call.
Bookings runs inside your Microsoft 365 tenant under the same Microsoft compliance commitments as Exchange Online and Teams, and we keep intake questions to what scheduling needs and set the mailbox retention you choose. Whether a given scheduling workflow meets your regulatory obligations is your compliance team's determination, not something a configuration project can certify. We document the data each page collects and where it lives so that determination is easy to make.
A booking page is a shared calendar for a team — several staff, several services, a tenant-level policy and an administrator — and is what this engagement builds. Bookings with me is a personal scheduling link each user can switch on in Outlook for one-to-one meetings on their own calendar; it needs no administrator and is not a page we build, though the training handout tells staff where it is.
Every page, policy and setting is in your tenant under your administrators' control, documented in the admin guide with each page's settings and embed code. The guide includes how to add a page or a staff member yourselves. If you would rather we did it, additional pages are quoted in writing, and customers who buy their Microsoft licensing through IT Partner get break-fix support during business hours at no extra charge.