Question. One thing Calendly lets you do is schedule meetings with a group of your team. People can pick and choose who they want to have a meeting with. You don't need to pre-define who is in the meeting. They can just do it adhoc. Can Bookings do this?
No. You can have multiple services on a calendar with different combinations of team members included, but you cannot do multi-team member plus team member selection in the same service.
My needs are strictly for scheduling at a university. No money exchanging hands. I need to find common times for meetings involving up to 25 people. And I need to be able to easily customize the dates in the calendar open for appointments. I tested both Bookings and Calendly. I didn't see that group meeting coordinating feature in Bookings. Was I missing it? I have been using free versions of Doodle for group meetings and Calendly for 1:1 meetings. Curious what you think would be the best solution for me. We don't take money and we use both Zoom and Teams, but not many other integrations at all.
Thanks for watching. Bookings isn't really designed for group meetings like that, it's designed for services where 1-2 people, perhaps a few more, might be involved in delivering whatever it is (a consultation, training session, massage, haircut) to a single person or to a group that books together. When you get into really big meetings, often the needs change a little, and if this is a meeting of colleagues for example where you all have Outlook calendars, I'd probably start with the existing availability finding tools in Outlook or perhaps investigate the Scheduling Poll capability in Outlook. The problem with these more automated tools for really big meetings (10-15+) is they take what's on the calendar as written in stone, and even with fairly open calendars, the likelihood that open time for 25 people matches at any point in the near future is fairly low. That said, my understanding is that Calendly is a little better at this than Bookings, but I still think expecting to automatically coordinate 25 different calendars is a big task for a tool like this.
That’s an interesting point. If you want to integrate with anything other than M365 then Bookings probably isn’t the best option, but I did not explore such requirements as my focus is generally M365 related.
I was wondering which platform offers the best implementation of double booking appointments in a more ad-hoc fashion. (Meaning, allowing the business staff to add double booking appointments based on particular business criteria). Any suggestions?
Thanks for watching. The purpose of these tools is to *avoid* double booking, though both have features to allow bookings with more than one contact (think of a training class or webinar). Layering different types of bookings on top of one another based on rules is outside the capabilities of both products but such a capability could be built through other means to link with your calendar.
Does Calendly or Bookings or any other software you know of that allows booking of a package of multiple online meetings? For example, I want to sell a package of 8 online meetings over the course of 2 months (one meeting a week). The client would be required to schedule 8 meetings at time of payment.
I was recently looking at a similar requirement, and, no, out of the box Bookings cannot do this, and I’m not aware of it being a feature in Calendly. The proposed solution from that discussion was to code a custom frontend leveraging the bookings graph API endpoints to make the bookings themselves. How much payback you’d get on this would probably be dependent on your scale. If dozens of bookings, then probably not cost effective, but hundreds or thousands, could be worthwhile. I’m not sure there are any other off the shelf solutions to do this other than pro ticketing systems, and then they don’t connect to your calendar.
Can I ask a few questions please. 1. If there are administrative/policy wise restrictions on integrating M365 with Calendly , is Calendly better then. What about integrating gmail and other email clients with Bookings -is it seamless. which is better ? can I suggest someone who is already using Calendly to integrate personal and other emails for the purpose of sharing calendars with other stakeholders ? If so what are the pros and hurdles. Thanks much
@andrewcorporate Calendly is an entirely separate product so other than blocking user access to authorize apps there is no control an admin on the M365 side has over Calendly. Equally, Bookings is a fully M365 integrated product, so if you want Gmail integration, you're better looking at another product. In most cases my advice would be one user = one calendar, or else what is the actual time management benefit of any one calendar? This is a feature of Calendly, but imo in most cases it represents a user training issue rather than a true technical necessity. If a client gave me the requirement of interrogating multiple calendars to book a meeting, I would want to understand why this became a requirement in the first place. Thanks for watching the video!
Question. One thing Calendly lets you do is schedule meetings with a group of your team. People can pick and choose who they want to have a meeting with. You don't need to pre-define who is in the meeting. They can just do it adhoc. Can Bookings do this?
No. You can have multiple services on a calendar with different combinations of team members included, but you cannot do multi-team member plus team member selection in the same service.
@@brightideasagency Thanks! That's kind of one of the distinguishers between Calendly and Bookings.
My needs are strictly for scheduling at a university. No money exchanging hands. I need to find common times for meetings involving up to 25 people. And I need to be able to easily customize the dates in the calendar open for appointments. I tested both Bookings and Calendly. I didn't see that group meeting coordinating feature in Bookings. Was I missing it? I have been using free versions of Doodle for group meetings and Calendly for 1:1 meetings. Curious what you think would be the best solution for me. We don't take money and we use both Zoom and Teams, but not many other integrations at all.
Thanks for watching. Bookings isn't really designed for group meetings like that, it's designed for services where 1-2 people, perhaps a few more, might be involved in delivering whatever it is (a consultation, training session, massage, haircut) to a single person or to a group that books together. When you get into really big meetings, often the needs change a little, and if this is a meeting of colleagues for example where you all have Outlook calendars, I'd probably start with the existing availability finding tools in Outlook or perhaps investigate the Scheduling Poll capability in Outlook. The problem with these more automated tools for really big meetings (10-15+) is they take what's on the calendar as written in stone, and even with fairly open calendars, the likelihood that open time for 25 people matches at any point in the near future is fairly low. That said, my understanding is that Calendly is a little better at this than Bookings, but I still think expecting to automatically coordinate 25 different calendars is a big task for a tool like this.
What about iCloud private calendar integration? This is the main deciding factor for me.
That’s an interesting point. If you want to integrate with anything other than M365 then Bookings probably isn’t the best option, but I did not explore such requirements as my focus is generally M365 related.
I was wondering which platform offers the best implementation of double booking appointments in a more ad-hoc fashion. (Meaning, allowing the business staff to add double booking appointments based on particular business criteria).
Any suggestions?
Thanks for watching.
The purpose of these tools is to *avoid* double booking, though both have features to allow bookings with more than one contact (think of a training class or webinar). Layering different types of bookings on top of one another based on rules is outside the capabilities of both products but such a capability could be built through other means to link with your calendar.
Does Calendly or Bookings or any other software you know of that allows booking of a package of multiple online meetings? For example, I want to sell a package of 8 online meetings over the course of 2 months (one meeting a week). The client would be required to schedule 8 meetings at time of payment.
I was recently looking at a similar requirement, and, no, out of the box Bookings cannot do this, and I’m not aware of it being a feature in Calendly. The proposed solution from that discussion was to code a custom frontend leveraging the bookings graph API endpoints to make the bookings themselves. How much payback you’d get on this would probably be dependent on your scale. If dozens of bookings, then probably not cost effective, but hundreds or thousands, could be worthwhile. I’m not sure there are any other off the shelf solutions to do this other than pro ticketing systems, and then they don’t connect to your calendar.
@@brightideasagency Thanks for your reply.
Can I ask a few questions please. 1. If there are administrative/policy wise restrictions on integrating M365 with Calendly , is Calendly better then. What about integrating gmail and other email clients with Bookings -is it seamless. which is better ? can I suggest someone who is already using Calendly to integrate personal and other emails for the purpose of sharing calendars with other stakeholders ? If so what are the pros and hurdles. Thanks much
@andrewcorporate Calendly is an entirely separate product so other than blocking user access to authorize apps there is no control an admin on the M365 side has over Calendly. Equally, Bookings is a fully M365 integrated product, so if you want Gmail integration, you're better looking at another product. In most cases my advice would be one user = one calendar, or else what is the actual time management benefit of any one calendar? This is a feature of Calendly, but imo in most cases it represents a user training issue rather than a true technical necessity. If a client gave me the requirement of interrogating multiple calendars to book a meeting, I would want to understand why this became a requirement in the first place. Thanks for watching the video!
your link to bookings is saying is blocked due to bullying or harassment.. just thought you should know
Thanks for pointing this out. Link has been updated and you can find the new version of this video here: czcams.com/video/nEjqE_u0DvY/video.html