Microsoft 365 Community Microsoft Graph, 1 Feb 2022

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From YouTube: Latest on Microsoft Bookings API on Microsoft Graph

Description

In this 17-minute developer focused demo – Altamish Ahmad aquaints viewers with Bookings - an appointment scheduling app that integrates with Outlook calendars and with Teams online meetings. Bookings allows calendar owners to publish their calendar to the outside world for purposes of allowing others to book appointments with owner. Available for 3 years already, Booking APIs are now available in Graph on v1.0 endpoint. Hear about use cases, object entities, key operations, permissions, newest APIs and roadmap. This PnP Community demo is taken from the weekly Microsoft 365 Platform Community call recorded on February 1, 2022.

Demo Presenter: Altamish Ahmad (Microsoft)

Supporting materials:
• Documentation - Microsoft Bookings API overview (preview) | https://docs.microsoft.com/graph/booking-concept-overview
• Documentation - Use the Microsoft Bookings API in Microsoft Graph | https://docs.microsoft.com/graph/api/resources/booking-api-overview?view=graph-rest-1.0
• Microsoft.com - Microsoft Bookings | https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/business/scheduling-and-booking-app?rtc=1
• Documentation - Use the Microsoft Bookings API in Microsoft Graph (v1) | https://docs.microsoft.com/graph/api/resources/booking-api-overview?view=graph-rest-1.0
• Documentation - Use the Microsoft Bookings API in Microsoft Graph (beta) | https://docs.microsoft.com/graph/api/resources/booking-api-overview?view=graph-rest-beta
• Article - New features in Microsoft Graph Bookings APIs provide enhanced booking infrastructure | https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/new-features-in-microsoft-graph-bookings-apis-provide-enhanced-booking-infrastructure/
• Article - Microsoft Graph Bookings APIs now available on the v1 endpoint | https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/microsoft-graph-bookings-apis-now-available-on-the-v1-endpoint/
• Documentation - Microsoft Bookings | https://docs.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/bookings/bookings-overview?view=o365-worldwide

Learn more:
• Learn more about the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community at: http://aka.ms/m365pnp
• Visit the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community YouTube channel: https://aka.ms/m365pnp/videos

A

Hey everyone. I believe this is the first time I am presenting about bookings, so I would like to first go through what bookings is and introduce bookings and bookings graph api to the community.

A

So what is bookings exactly booking is an appointment, scheduling software, which provides you an efficient way of connecting with your stakeholders to simplify it further. It allows you to publish your calendar to the outside world, so any stakeholder, be it your customer or anyone else, can book an appointment efficiently with you now it takes it a step further. It's not just appointment with you, but you and your team as well. So there are a lot of business logics and external customers external store holders.

A

Even internal stakeholders can book appointment with you and your team using this solution. Now it's used by both enterprises and small businesses. A business can offer multiple services and can be served by many staff members. As I told you like, for example, let's take a salon or a spa, so it can offer services like a hair cut or a facial and many other things right. So you can configure the same in your calendar, and people can book an appointment for each of your services.

A

It is also seamlessly integrated with the outlet calendars of staff members, so uh it, for example, if you are a staff member in bookings, uh your calendar like when you are busy and when you are free. All these things are taken into account before the appointment is scheduled.

A

One of the great features which is which it has is that it's integrated with teams for online meetings, so I can book an appointment for a visit to you to your location, or we can just have an online meeting using teams. It is secure and compliant. It inherits the policies of exchange mailboxes, the users of bookings are many-fold, and I wanted to introduce you through to the many use cases which we have across industries.

A

One of the key sectors is education in education. A lot of use cases are there. For example, students can book one-on-one appointment with their professors.

A

It also it's also used by many universities where staff members and the prof teachers connect with parents. It is used for students to connect with career counselors. One of the very interesting use cases of bookings is that you cannot just book appointments with human beings or staff members. You can in fact book appointments with any resource which has a mailbox one of our customers in fact uses bookings so that people can book company cars.

A

Healthcare is another prominent sector, and it uh it is. It grew many fold during the pandemic because it allowed people to book virtual consultation through bookings. It's not just virtual consultation, any kind of tests procedures can be booked using microsoft. Bookings government is also the use. Cases across governments are also huge, as you can see over here, it was even used by interesting things like police to connect with citizens.

A

It's used across finance and retail as well. In retail. One of the interesting use cases was that people were booking appointment with personal shoppers like customers. Can, you know, have an appointment scheduled with one of the personal shoppers in the store and they can visit the store and get a personalized experience.

A

There are a lot of generic use cases as well, for example within an organization, a lot of senior members like cxos and all open their calendars, so that people can have office hours with them. It's also used for sales use cases where sales people in the sales organization connect with sales leads. Webinars are also common use cases where more than one person can join an appointment.

A

Internal connect with tech supports recruitment are other significant use cases. Finance was another key sector. It's just like healthcare, where you are booking a appointment with some expert to provide you a service.

A

Now, how are apis typically used so uh bookings graph apis have in beta have been there for about three years now and we have uh multiple use cases, some of them which I'm highlighting over here. uh So one of our top healthcare customers. What it does is, it is a it has an existing ehr system and it uses the booking apis to create a custom solution which is within their ehr system, so they don't want their staff to go outside the hr system, so they have used bookings apis for this.

A

Another customer uses it for a very interesting use case. So, typically, when the appointments are created in bookings, they appear in a calendar like view, but this customer what they did was that they had a cue view instead of a typical calendar view, which was more convenient to their staff. Members to operate on integration with other systems is another important use case, so basically bookings data can be synced with salesforce and dynamics and other crm solutions.

A

So typically, what happens in bookings? You are actually often connecting with customers or potential leads, and you would want them to be in your crm solutions as well. So you one can use apis to sync the data to these systems.

A

Many people also use bookings so that they can integrate it within their workflows. So, for example, a solution which offers customer care has integrated a custom tool made using bookings apis in their workflow.

A

So it's a customer care solution and their customer care solution has many steps in one of the steps they have used booking apis to create a custom solution.

A

Another important use case is that it is used for automating admin setups. So basically, the booking calendars has a lot of settings.

A

I will walk you through all the entities which are there, and each of these entities has a lot of administrator settings around it, and sometimes an organization can have many calendars, hundreds of calendars, and they don't want to do it manually, so they will just use the apis to automate the entire setup process.

A

So let me actually walk you through how the bookings is structured. So there are like five key entities in bookings. The most important and the top level object is the business object, so the business object contains all the business or information of your organization.

A

It can contain things like what your business website is. What is what are your policies? uh What are your working hours? uh It can also have some compliance related information over there. So the business is the top level object and it it kind of defines your business. For example, a salon is a business or a healthcare clinic is a business now each of these businesses can provide various services, and in the beginning of my presentation I took the example of a saloon which is providing services like haircut or a facial or some other thing.

A

So every business can have a lot of services, healthcare can have say a one-on-one consultation or some kind of procedure safe over testing, so these all will be services. Now this service objects represents the information which is provided by the service. It also consists of important details like who are these staff members in your organization who are providing the service? What are the working hours of the service? What is the communication which will go from the service to your customers? For example? There will be a confirmation, mail and you can configure multiple reminders mail.

A

You can also configure sms if you so want now. The third key entity is customer now. Customer here is a generic term for your booking calendar, any stakeholder who is actually booking an appointment for you who is actually requesting a service from you as a customer. In the case of healthcare industry, a patient will be a customer. In the case of education, a student is a customer, so customer is the third key entity of bookings and every time someone comes and creates a booking appointment with you. That person is also stored as a customer object.

A

The fourth key entity of bookings is the staff member now staff member are the stakeholders who are actually going to provide some kind of service to the customers. They may also be administrators of the calendar.

A

So in our staff member entity we have various roles like administrator, scheduler or a team member, so administrators may or may not provide service to a customer, but administrator will manage the entire calendar we will manage. The settings will define the rules of the calendar so in in, uh as I said, there is another interesting use case of booking where uh you know it need not be a human.

A

There can be a resource mailbox, for example, the uh I use the example of a car which was the which, in an organization people were using to book, so even a resource mailbox can act as a staff. Member now, the most important entity obviously are the appointments. So whenever a customer comes to the booking calendar and creates a booking request, it becomes an appointment object. So basically the appointment will contain information like who is the staff member who is providing the service?

A

Who are the customers, since there can be more than one customers as well and uh other details which we can collect from the customers? So uh I hope it's clear over here I'll move forward. So what are the key operations and permissions so for all these entities, which are there business service, customer staff, member and appointments? We have the typical crud operations. We have the list, uh get update, delete and post apis for all of them. Apart from this, we have uh publish and unpublish apis. Let me explain what that is for the calendar.

A

You need to publish it to the outside world so that they can come and book an appointment with you so to publish that there is the publish api and you can also unpublish the calendar using then publish apis. The permissions which are available right now are delegated permissions for work and school accounts. We have some other updates, coming, which I will speak about it later in the presentation.

A

So typically right now it will be the admins and the schedulers internally, who would be scheduling the appointments, but, as I will mention in the later slides, we are also working on application permissions which will allow anyone to come and create an appointment all right. So this was a basic introduction of bookings and I wanted to go into the details, because this is the first time I'm presenting this to the community.

A

So let me talk about what is new as well. So one of the key features which is new is custom questions, so custom questions gives you the ability to collect extra information from the customer for an appointment.

A

So typically, when you create an appointment, the customer will enter basic details like the name phone number address and he can enter he or she can enter some note. However, custom questions gives the booking administrator the power to get more information. For example, a health care provider might want some kind of insurance details, so they will create a custom question, and now the customer or the patient here will enter the insurance information in that custom fields. Similarly, you can use custom fields for multiple other use cases.

A

Now we have introduced a new api for custom questions altogether and custom questions becomes one of the entities in addition to the key entities which I spoke about before the other key feature which we added was sms support. Now sms notification was one of the most requested features for our main bookings product and recently we introduced it in in the apis as well. This sms notification feature allows you to send notifications to customers for their appointment. Till now we were just sending email reminders, email, confirmations and email notifications.

A

Now, along with the email, there is a feature to also allow us to send sms right now. This is only available for us and canada. However, europe is on the way. The third feature which we added in the api was online meeting support. So for our appointment object earlier in booking solutions, it was just an appointment. However, we added the teams feature so that people can have an online virtual consultation.

A

Now this support is also configurable via the apis. The fourth key feature which we worked on was group appointments. So let me give you what uh what is a one-on-one appointment and what's a group appointment in case of a one-on-one appointment, it's typically one customer is being serviced by a staff member. So, for example, in the case of a medical appointment, one patient will be there and one doctor will be there. This will be a typical one-on-one scenario in group appointments. You can have many customers join the same appointment.

A

For example, it can be a webinar or a online class given by an educator. A webinar given by a marketer can be typical use cases you people can also use it when there are, there is an ability to provide service to more than one folk more than one person in an appointment, for example, a saloon which I uh used, as as an example earlier, can provide haircut to 10 people within a window. So there also they can configure a group appointment.

A

So group appointment is another feature which we have added now in the apis. uh It was there in our main app before so. The biggest appointment biggest announcement we have currently is that our apis, which were on beta for about three years, are now available on the v1 endpoint and this got released in december. So all of you are uh request all of you to go uh and try it out. I have uh the links to all the documentations in the in the presentation.

A

There are few things which has changed and I would like to highlight them as well, so this these changes are there for the apis. Since earlier we were only supporting one-on-one appointment and now we are supporting group appointments.

A

Hence we have changed the way customer information is stored in the appointment object, instead of everything being available at the root level. All the customer information now it's available as an array within the customer object. So it's not a big change. It's just that everything moves from the root level to an array. uh This will help people schedule group appointments.

A

There were certain attributes which were there in beta, which were around invoicing, which we no longer support and we have removed them. We have removed a couple of attributes. These changes are small, for example, the start and end of an end attribute of an appointment have been renamed to start and end time, so I will give the documentation link there and you can check it out in beta. Even the attributes which have been changed are still there. Mark is deprecated, but v1. Only the new attributes are there.

A

What is upcoming? So we have a lot of plans around the bookings apis. So one of the most important things which we are building is application permissions.

A

So we are going to be providing application permissions to all the apis of customer and appointment entities for business, service staff, member and custom questions. We will provide application permissions for the read apis, typically for the get and the list one. So the goal is to enable self scheduling scenario. Another api which is coming is get staff availability api. This will return when the staff members are free, uh one and the application permission and github availability.

A

Api together will allow the self scheduling scenarios the really schedule beta is planned by the end of march 2022 v1 by the end of june 2022 for application permission and get staff availability.

A

uh You can reach out to me and the team if you want to be part of an early private preview program, this last slides, are all the resources you can just check out the documentation of v1 and beta. You can check out the new blocks and microsoft booking documentation in general thanks. Everyone.

B

Great great information- and there are a lot of questions in the chat regarding sms and some other things. If you'd like to check those out and respond on there, I think that'd be very helpful. Yeah I'll go ahead. All right! Thank you. So much.