Bookings is designed to support a complex organization, called the Business, where one or more people offer one or more different services. In an academic context, this can have a number of possible applications:

  • Manage a single calendar for a faculty member teaching multiple courses, and who has multiple teaching assistants offering office hours.

  • Delegate appointment management for a group of faculty members to an administrative assistant in an academic department.

  • Manage appointments for a laboratory where several staff are available for office hours, tutorials, or demonstrations.

  • Offer windows of time during the week for staff to conduct demonstrations or tutorials for University services. 



The Business offers Services. Your business might offer only one service, such as office hours, or you might define other services like exam reviews, lab demonstrations, office hours for specific courses if you have multiple sections or makeup exams. You can define different time durations for each service, and assign specific staff to them, so think about the kinds of things students usually need to do in their appointments, how long these things take, and who the best people are for those assignments if you have multiple people to take on the work. Of course, if it’s only you, and your office hours are simple events, Bookings will accommodate that too.


Services are assigned to Staff. Staff can be anyone who will take appointments using this calendar. Faculty, students, and University staff are all “staff” in Bookings.



Customers use the Booking Page to schedule appointments for one or more Services you defined. Bookings will sync with your Outlook calendar to make sure you don’t end up with double bookings and will also let you define a scheduling policy to help you keep your day manageable.


For an optimal Bookings experience, we recommend you establish the largest possible umbrella for all the services and staff represented in your calendar, then break that out into services and availability windows for staff to cover. Here is an example:


  1. You teach three courses for the spring semester, and you have two TA's each in two of those courses.

  2. You want to manage everything in one calendar, so you name your calendar Chemistry Course Appointments for Prof Smith. In the Staff screen, you add all the people you work within your courses and labs as staff.

  3. Because you have three courses, you define an office hours service for each, and name them according to the section numbers. Perhaps you ask your students to make appointments if they need some extra time in the lab, so you’ll need a service for that as well. You can define specific windows during which services are offered, so if you only want TA's to take appointments in the mornings, or only want students coming for extra lab time in the late afternoon, you can set that limit.

  4. Now you’ll assign your staff to each service as appropriate. Each of your office hours services gets assigned to you and the TA's for that course. The Lab Time services gets assigned to your TA's or your lab staff.

  5. When you’re finished setting everything up, you can publish your Bookings calendar. You’ll have a URL to share on your syllabus, in Blackboard, through email, or however you need to communicate.