Exchange Online Scheduling and Bookings Roadmap 2023

• A Bookings-based feature in Exchange Online will improve meeting scheduling for individuals and outside participants.
• The Bookings service continues to receive improvements.
• Several scheduling products have had short lives; only Teams and Outlook features appear secure long term.

Bookings is a Web application for the scheduling and management of appointments with Exchange Online users that is included in Microsoft 365 suites. It was originally designed for customers to book appointments with groups of professionals delivering services, such as therapists in a clinic, and it continues to improve in that role. However, Exchange Online has adopted Bookings technology to help schedule meetings between individual users and both internal and external participants. Some customers will use this “Bookings with me” feature to replace third-party scheduling extensions such as freebusy.io or Doodle, which could reduce costs and simplify management.

Bookings With Me in Exchange Online

The “Bookings with me” feature is a Web application available in Exchange Online and Outlook on the Web. (The feature also appears under other names, including “bookable time” and “Bookings in Outlook”.) It allows an Exchange Online user to accept meeting proposals via a public Web interface open to internal and external users, including those without Exchange Online. Users can limit their availability times and control other aspects of the meetings (such as duration). Meetings can be proposed only when the user has availability, and proposals update the user’s calendar directly. The feature is on by default: administrators can disable it for the entire tenant or for specific users.