End-user computing (EUC) refreshes can place significant logistical challenges on an organisation. Whilst technologies like Windows 10 Autopilot will take us to a place where users can self-provision, often there’s more involved and some training is required to help users to adopt the technology (and potentially associated business changes).
Over the last few years, I’ve worked on projects that have used a variety of systems to manage the allocation of training/handover sessions to people but they’ve always been lacking in some way. We’ve tried using a PowerApps app, and a SharePoint calendar extension but then Microsoft made their Bookings app available on Office 365 Enterprise subscriptions (it was previously only available for Business subscriptions).
Microsoft Bookings is designed for small businesses and the example given in the Microsoft documentation is a pet grooming parlour. You could equally apply the app to other scenarios though: a hairdressing salon; bike repairs; or IT Services.
I can’t see Microsoft Bookings on my tenant!
That’s because, by default, it’s not there for Enterprise customers. Most of my customers use an E3 or E5 subscription and I was able to successfully test on a trial E3 tenant. My E1 was no good though…
The process to add the Business Apps (free) – including Bookings – to an Enterprise tenant will depend on whether it’s Credit Card (PAYG), Enterprise Agreement (EA) or Cloud Solutions Provider (CSP) licenced but it’s fully documented by Microsoft. When I enabled it on my test tenant, I received an invoice for £0.00.
So, how do I configure Microsoft Bookings?
The app is built around a calendar on a website, with a number of services and assigned staff. Each “staff member” needs to have a valid email address but they don’t need to be a real person – all of the email messages could be directed to a single mailbox, which also reduces the number of licences needed to operate the solution.
It took some thinking about how to do this for my End User Device Handover scenario but I set up:
- A calendar for the project.
- A service for the handover sessions. Use this to control when services are provided (e.g. available times and staff).
- A number of dummy “staff” for the number of slots in each session (e.g. 10 people in each session, 10 slots so 10 “staff”).
Once all of the staff available for a session are booked (i.e. all of the slots for a session are full), it’s no longer offered in the calendar. There’s no mechanism for preventing multiple/duplicate bookings but a simple manual check to export a .TSV file with all of the bookings each day will allow those to be identified and remediated.
(Incidentally, Excel wouldn’t open a TSV file for me. What I could do though was open the file in Notepad and copy/paste it to Excel, for sorting and identification of multiple bookings from the same email address.)
Further reading
These blog posts are a couple of years old now but helped a lot: