My bookings and Personal calendar syncing

Question

Use bookings to allow HR to schedule sensitive appointments with new employees. I want team to check bookings calendar for the appointment, and not have appointments show on individual team member's outlook calendar. Is this possible?

Answer 1

Hi @Emcculley,

Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Q&A Forum.

By design, Microsoft Bookings creates an event on the assigned staff member’s Outlook calendar. Currently, there is no native option to prevent this behavior. While customers only see the Bookings page with free/busy information and not personal calendar details, the appointment itself will still appear on the calendars of the staff assigned to that booking.

There is no supported configuration where Bookings avoids creating any event on associated mailboxes while still auto-assigning appointments to specific staff members. This functionality is necessary to ensure proper delivery of notifications, confirmations, and Teams meeting links.

As an alternative, you can create a dedicated Bookings page for HR onboarding or other sensitive appointments and avoid adding individual team members as staff. HR can manage all appointments centrally through the Bookings app in Teams or on the web.

You can then share the Bookings calendar (or export it to a separate HR calendar) with the team so they can view scheduled appointments without having entries appear on their personal calendars. Additionally, enable granular privacy settings in your tenant such as blocking staff details from customers and disabling search indexing to keep booking pages and notifications discreet.

• Pros: No appointments will appear on team members’ personal calendars.
• Cons: You will not be able to automatically route appointments to specific individuals unless they are explicitly added as staff.

However, you just suggest an innovative suggestion for the development team. I believe this is an important feature for many users, and your feedback can help prioritize it. Please share your feedback directly with the Outlook team through the Feedback Hub in Outlook (go to Help > Feedback) or you can submit your feedback directly to Outlook · Community, where our product development team can know your requirements and ideas for product improvements. The team actively monitors user input, and many improvements have been made based on community suggestions.

Note: As Microsoft Community moderators, please note that we are not involved in product design decisions and do not have direct access to the development roadmap, we want to assure you that your feedback has been acknowledged and is valued.  

In the meantime, if you see my replies bring helpful information, please kindly accept it as an answer and vote it up by your original account, which raised this question. Once marked, it will automatically pin to top. As other users will also search information in this community, your valuable vote up will definitely also help other users who have similar queries easily to find the correct channel and useful information more quickly.   

I hope this provides enough clarity and helps you stay inform with your current situation.

Thank you for your patience and your understanding. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel free to share them in the comments on this post so I can continue to support you.

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