Other Business Application Roadmaps

by
Rob Helm

by
Rob Helm

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration services and client software. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s... more

Some niche services are bundled with Microsoft 365 plans and could be useful for specific organizations.

Bookings

Bookings offers online scheduling and management of appointments with customers and other visitors from outside the organization. Bookings was originally designed to book appointments between customers and teams of professionals delivering services, such as therapists in a clinic. Bookings continues in that role, but its technology also  supports virtual appointment scheduling in Teams and other features in Exchange Online.  Bookings also could help customers replace third-party scheduling extensions such as freebusy.io or Doodle to reduce costs and simplify management.

Bookings hasn’t received any improvements since the Queue scheduler interface in 2025. Microsoft also hasn’t stated any plans for Bookings in 2026, even though Outlook and Teams scheduling are due for many improvements the same year. Most likely, Bookings development will slow, and future improvements for customer scheduling will come in Outlook and Teams.