Bookings in Outlook is coming to help you reduce the back and forth in scheduling, while helping you maintain control of your calendar. With your own personal bookings page, you’ll be able to create custom meeting types to share with others so they can easily find a time to schedule a meeting with you according to your availability and preferences. While Microsoft Bookings is designed for group and team scheduling, Bookings in Outlook is meant only for the owner of the mailbox and is based only on their preferences and availability.

How it works

When someone schedules a meeting with you using your personal booking page, you will both receive an email confirmation. Attendees can update or cancel scheduled meetings with you directly from your personal bookings page.

Bookings in Outlook has two different views:

Organizer view

A personal booking page where you can create meeting types that others can book with you. Custom meeting types give you the ability to customize when you want to meet and how that meeting type is shared with others. You control whether each meeting type is public to your scheduling page or is private and can only be accessed by a select group of people. You can also choose to add a Teams meeting to all meetings booked through your Bookings in Outlook page. And you can access your Bookings in Outlook page through Outlook on the web. After you set up your page and publish it, you can share it with others. For example, you can add it to your Outlook signature.

Scheduling view

When you share your Bookings in Outlook page with others, they will see the scheduling view. Which meetings are shown in the scheduling view depends on if you shared the link to your Bookings in Outlook page with public meetings or you shared a private link for an individual meeting.

There are also two different meeting types:

Public meetings

These can be viewed and scheduled by anyone that has your Bookings in Outlook page link. You are in control of who you share that link with. All public meeting types will be visible to anyone that has your Bookings in Outlook page link.

Private meetings

As you might expect, these can only be viewed by people who have the link for that meeting type. The difference between public meetings and private meetings is private meetings can have different links and the links expire after 90 days. You can also set private links to expire after a one-time booking. When accessing the scheduling view for a private meeting, only that meeting type will be visible.

When this will happen

Bookings in Outlook will first roll out as a preview version. A targeted release to select users and organizations will take place from early to mid-June, followed by general availability shortly thereafter.

How it will affect your organization

All users with the following subscriptions will have access to Bookings in Outlook by default:

• Office 365: A3, A5, E1, E3, E5, F1, F3
• Microsoft 365: A3, A5, E1, E3, E5, F1, F3, Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium

Once set up, users will be able to access their personal booking page from the Outlook web calendar or through the link https://outlook.office.com/bookwithme/.

How to prepare

Bookings in Outlook will be enabled by default for users that meet the licensing requirements. You can disable access to creating a personal booking page for your organization or select users. For instructions on how to do this, check here.