Integration with Bookings with me

Bookings with me is an online booking service that lets Microsoft 365 end users create a personal booking interface they can use to manage appointments on their own. The interface is called a booking page and can be easily shared with co-workers or external users (customers). Once you send them a link to the booking page, they can easily book a meeting with you.

Bookings with me is available with the Microsoft 365 business plans listed here. As a native Microsoft solution, it integrates with your mailbox, calendar, and Teams.

Adding a booking page link to your email signature(s) managed by CodeTwo Email Signatures 365 can be a good idea to:

• let others quickly check your busy/free times and arrange a meeting with you,
• avoid the chore of configuring meetings and sending meeting links manually,
• save time otherwise spent on long email conversations to arrange for all the details.

To add the link to an email signature, you need to set up both Bookings with me and CodeTwo Email Signatures 365. This integration requires a little bit of cooperation between an admin and end user(s).

Configure Bookings with me

The Bookings with me interface is quite simple, with the majority of the options being rather self-explanatory. For the sake of the presentation, we’ll focus only on the essential steps of configuration, without exploring all the possibilities.

Bookings with me is configured by end users. To start the configuration, sign in to Outlook on the web (OWA), click the calendar icon on the left, and click Create booking page (Fig. 1.).

Fig. 1. Accessing the Bookings with me dashboard.

Next, you need to create either a Public (A) or Private (B) meeting (Fig. 2.). Public meetings are available to anyone who has a link to your booking page. Access to private meetings is more restricted. If someone wants to book a private meeting with you, you need to share a direct link to that meeting with them (the link to your booking page will not show any private meetings you configured).

Fig. 2. The empty Bookings with me dashboard – you need to add either a public (A) or a private (B) meeting.

When you click a plus sign, you’ll see the interface where you can set up all the aspects of a new meeting (Fig. 3.). Name your meeting, give it a relevant description, set the duration & hours when co-workers/customers can book the meeting with you, and so on. You can also configure advanced options such as buffer time before and after your meeting.

Once everything’s ready, click Save to submit all the changes.

Fig. 3. Configuring a new meeting.

As soon as you create your first meeting, your booking page goes live, so you can copy its link to view it in a browser or share it with others using the Share button. Clicking the ellipsis button lets you edit the page’s banner image or disable your page (Fig. 4.).

Fig. 4. Buttons that let you edit and share your booking page.

If you want, you can configure more meetings that co-workers/customers will be able to book by using your booking page.

Add the booking page link to an email signature

Integrating a booking page link into an email signature requires an admin and end user(s) to complete certain steps in CodeTwo Email Signatures 365.

Admin's part

Create a custom attribute

First, you need to create a CodeTwo custom attribute that each user will be able to use to store their booking page link.

To do it, sign in to the User attributes manager at attributes.codetwo.com with Microsoft 365 global admin credentials.

Next, create the attribute according to these instructions, naming it e.g. Bookings with me link. Once the attribute is created, remember to click Save to apply your changes (Fig. 5.).

Fig. 5. Creating the custom attribute to store a booking page link.

Add a linked text to a signature template

Now, it’s time to modify a selected signature by adding a text that will turn into a clickable booking page link.

1. To start, sign in at app.codetwo.com.
2. On the signature rules’ list, choose the signature which you want to add the booking page link to. It can be, for example, a company-wide signature that applies to all users, or a signature for a group of users that are allowed to create booking pages in your organization.
3. To go straight to editing the signature’s design (template), hover your mouse cursor over the signature’s thumbnail and click Edit signature (Fig. 6.).

   Info

   If you use Small as your preferred signature rule list view, you need to click your chosen signature, go to the Design step, and click Edit signature.

Fig. 6. Opening the selected signature template for editing.

4. Once the template editor opens, put the cursor in the place where you want to add the link. If necessary, add a new line to the signature by pressing Shift + Enter.
5. Type the text that will be linked to email sender’s booking page, for example Book a meeting with me (Fig. 7.). You can also use the tools available on the Main tab of the editor to style the text to match the signature’s design. Learn more

Fig. 7. Typing the text to be linked to user’s booking page.

6. Next, click HTML source on the editor’s ribbon (see Fig. 7.) to open signature’s HTML code for editing.
7. In the HTML source code view window, modify the code as follows:
   • Locate the text you typed in step 5, e.g. by using the Find text feature (Fig. 8., item 1):

     Book a meeting with me

   • Change the text the following way:

     <a href="{Bookings with me link}">Book a meeting with me</a>

     as shown in Fig. 8., item 2. {Bookings with me link} is the name of the custom attribute you created in this section. You can insert the attribute into the source code by typing it manually or by selecting it from the menu: Placeholder > Message Sender > Additional attributes (Fig. 8., item 3).

   • Save your changes by clicking Apply & Close (Fig. 8., item 4).

Fig. 8. Adding the custom attribute that will turn into a link in an email signature.

8. Once you’re back in the editor, highlight your (linked) text, click Remove empty placeholder, and move the closing RT tag ({/RT}) to the next line, so that your design looks as shown in Fig. 9. Thanks to that, if a given end user doesn’t configure a booking page, the line with the linked text will be removed from the signature and its design won’t be affected in any way. Learn more about this feature

Fig. 9. Using the Remove empty placeholder feature.

9. Save your changes by clicking Publish & Close (or Apply & Close > Save & Publish if you opened the editor from the signature rule editing pane).

End user’s part

Finally, for the integration to work, an end user needs to copy their booking page link and paste it into CodeTwo’s User info editor as a value for the custom attribute created by the admin. Here’s how it goes:

1. Access your Bookings with me dashboard via Outlook on the web (OWA), as shown in Fig. 1. at the beginning of this article.

   Info

   If you’ve already configured your booking page, you’ll see Edit booking page instead of Create booking page.

2. Click the Share button and select Copy link (Fig. 10.).

Fig. 10. Copying a link to a booking page.

3. Now, sign in to user.codetwo.com, using your Microsoft 365 (Office 365) credentials.
4. Paste the link into the text box that’s next to the custom attribute designed for storing the link (in this example: Bookings with me link) and click Save & update to apply the change (Fig. 11.).

Fig. 11. Pasting the booking page link as the value of the custom attribute.

The final result

Once all the configuration steps are completed, a link to end user’s booking page will be included in their signature. When an email recipient clicks the link, they will be able to book a meeting with the end user (Fig. 12.).

Fig. 12. Accessing end user’s booking page from an email signature.

See also

Learn more about the User attributes manager