Overview
Learn how to set office hours using Microsoft Bookings. This is intended for faculty, staff, or graduate employees (GEs) who are looking to structure office hours or other support time through availability and the use of appointments.
Prerequisites
In order to set your available office hours for others to book, you will need to have done the following:
Setting your available hours
In your Bookings page, you will need to navigate to the Booking page setting of your Bookings calendar. If you have multiple Bookings calendars, select the calendar first, then navigate to the Booking page setting. Under Manage your booking page, expand the Default scheduling policy box.
Considerations
The following considerations are going to differ between users depending upon their preferences and their availability.
Time increments
- Time increments allows you to set the length of the appointment. There are presets anywhere between five minutes up to four hours as well as customizable lengths if you choose.
- For office hours, perhaps you want to limit the appointment to a given length to accommodate more students in a given time.
Minimum lead time
- Lead time can be set between 0 and 179 hours.
- For faculty and graduate employees with office hours: Keeping this number low would be beneficial for almost drop-in appointments.
Maximum lead time
- By default, it is set for 365 days.
- For faculty and graduate employees with office hours: Keeping this number under 7 days could be useful for keeping office hours appointments more topical.
General Availability
- In order to set office hours, we recommend selecting Custom hours (recurring weekly) in order to set your availability in a given week.
- Faculty and graduate employees: You can set this to your office hours day(s) and available time(s) (e.g., Monday 10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.)
- Staff: You could set this to your general work time (e.g., 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.)
- Once your availability is set, it is connected to your Outlook calendar and any available appointment times are accounted for.
Once the settings are made to your liking, you can publish your Bookings page.
For more information about other settings to your Booking page, please consult the Setting your Booking page settings section in the Getting Started with Microsoft Bookings article.
Publishing your Bookings page
At the top of the Booking page settings, there is a link to your Bookings page. This URL can be inserted anywhere that can be published online (i.e., email signature, Canvas course page, department website, etc.). Go into the Booking page settings then select either Share to email or Embed to a website to proceed.
For more information on those steps, please refer to the Setting your Booking page settings article section in the Getting Started with Microsoft Bookings article.
Reserving an appointment time
To reserve an appointment time, those looking to make the appointment would go to your Bookings page URL and choose one of the available time slots in accordance with your availability.
Appointees would select a service (if there are multiple options), a date and time, and fill in a brief form with their name, email address, phone number, and any notes for you to consider.
Once an appointment is made, you will be notified via email with the details and it will also appear within your Outlook calendar.
Need Help?
For more assistance, please submit a request ticket to the Microsoft Office 365 Support page or consider the following related articles.