The following article outlines the main areas in MS Bookings and how they should be configured for the Wellness Navigator.

Calendar

Nothing needs to be configured here. It will become a useful tool for someone viewing/managing the bookings after they are added.

Booking page

In order to have customers create bookings, they need a booking page to use. MS Bookings will create a URL for you which you can email to customers or post on a website.

Manage your booking page

Business page access control

It is not necessary to check either option here but it might be a good idea to require a one-time password to create a booking if you find that “bots” are booking slots instead of actual students.

Customer data usage content

This is where you would enter our data collection and usage terms. It is recommended that you direct students to our privacy policy at Privacy and Consent Policies | Current Students | University of Waterloo. That way, it’s kept up to date.

Default scheduling policy

• Set time increments to the duration of each appointment (e.g., 30 minutes).

• Set minimum and maximum lead times for bookings and cancellations, if desired.

• For Email notifications

  • Unless the “business” has an email address that is being monitored, there’s no point in notifying it when a booking is created or changed so uncheck this.

  • Be sure to check Send a meeting invite to the customer.

• Check/uncheck Staff control based on your preference.

• For General availability, use the drop-down to choose Custom hours (recurring weekly) and then set the start and end times for each day.

Customers

I don’t believe it is necessary to add anyone here. I see Gowtham is there but only for testing purposes.

Staff

Here is where everyone involved with the project is added. Gowtham, Sean, and Lance are Administrators while Kathy and Thara are Team members.

For each Team member, hover over them with your mouse and click the pencil icon to edit their profile.

• Ensure their name, initials, email address, and phone number (if applicable) are correct.

• Check the option to notify them when a booking assigned to them is created or changed.

• Check the option for Events on Office calendar to affect availability (to avoid double-booking them in case they have other meetings).

• Turn off Use business hours and configure their exact hours based on the days and times they provide. Since the drop-downs only provide options for every 30 minutes, you will need to manually type in the times if they do not fall on the hour or half hour (e.g., 11:15, 2:45, etc.).

Services

Services allows you to set up different books for each service you will provide. For the Wellness Navigator, there is only one service.

To add or edit a service, click the Services link on the left and then choose Edit service.

Basic details

In this area, you can give the service a name, describe what it is about, provide a location for the service, set the duration and cost of each session, and add any notes.

For the Wellness Navigator, the location is set to STC 2031 and the duration is set to 30 min.

Availability options

Here you can set a Scheduling policy and Availability.

Scheduling policy

Set Time increments to the length of the appointments (e.g., 30 minutes).

Set Minimum lead time to the desired time that a student can book before the appointment (e.g., 0 hrs).

Set Maximum lead time to the number of days a booking can be made in advance (e.g., 30 days).

Availability

Set to Custom hours (recurring weekly) and ensure the days/hours match when the appointments will be available.

Assign staff

Select the staff that will be conducting the appointments.

Custom fields

Check each field that you want available for collecting information from the students and toggle on the ones you want to be Required.