What is Microsoft Bookings?
Microsoft Bookings is an online scheduling tool available to UQ staff through Microsoft 365 that allows people to book meetings via a web‑based form. With the increasing use of oral tasks at UQ, Microsoft Bookings enables students to schedule time with their teaching team without the need for back‑and‑forth emails. The booking page integrates directly with Outlook to reflect staff availability, allowing students to select suitable time slots while automated notifications help reduce no‑shows and keep everyone informed
How is it different to Outlook meetings?
Microsoft Bookings allows students to self‑book available time slots through a booking link based on predefined availability, making it more efficient for consultations, learning support, and oral tasks. Outlook meetings, by contrast, are scheduled manually and often require staff to check availability and coordinate times with students via email.
Microsoft Bookings for Courses
While Microsoft Bookings is available to staff as an app in Microsoft Teams and Outlook for individual use, Microsoft Bookings for courses provides shared booking capabilities. This allows teaching teams to invite multiple staff members, create shared booking pages, and enable students to book time with the appropriate team member.
Each course booking page can include up to 50 services. For example, a course might offer separate services for General Consultations, a Formative Interview task, and a Final Interactive Oral task, allowing students to book the appropriate appointment type as needed.
Early Adopter Courses
Microsoft Bookings for courses is currently being provisioned through a manual configuration process managed by the UQ eLearning System and Support team and ITS during the Early Adopter period. As part of this trial, seven courses across three faculties at UQ are participating, each representing different booking requirements and use cases. This controlled approach allows the UQ eLearning Systems and Support Team, in collaboration with ITS, to assess how Microsoft Bookings can best support course‑level needs and to gather feedback ahead of a broader University‑wide rollout planned for the following semester.
Use Cases
- Formative assessment tasks, such as Learning Progress Check-in Interviews, are used throughout the semester.
- Summative assessment tasks, such as the End-of-Semester Interviews.
- Individual student sessions.
- Group student sessions.
How does it work?
From the UQ Bookings apps, you can configure your course booking page, add the relevant services, set your availability, add team members, schedule new appointments, and manage existing bookings—all within familiar UQ‑supported Microsoft tools. With flexible settings and customisation options, Bookings can be adapted to suit a wide range of teaching, support, and administrative contexts at UQ.
Refer to the Microsoft Bookings for Courses guide for step-by-step instructions.
For further instructions on Microsoft Bookings, refer to the Microsoft 365 resources.