Set Up a Department: Weinberg College - Northwestern University

Set Up a Department

There main topics to know for setting up a department are:

The Bookings Page, a department-wide settings page
Staff Options
Services Options
Publishing Bookings to students (or others who will be making appointments)
Advanced Features

The "Booking Page" and Managing Bookings as a University Department

This collection of settings, accessible via the left menu in Bookings, is your departments's default settings.

Scheduling Policy - Set your time increment display to the most common duration of student appointments, whether that is 15, 30, or 60 minutes. Iindividual services, when needed, can override the setting.
Set your minimum lead time to 24 hours unless you are going to permit schedule changes right up to the time of the appointment. This setting prevents students from scheduling a new appointment fewer than 24 hours in advance. For maximum lead time, enter the number of days in the upcoming term so that, on the first day of the term, students can book up to the last day of the term. Seventy days is the example above.
Email notifications - Check both boxes.
Staff - Check the box to allow customers to choose a specific person for the booking.
Availability - Set the dropdown under “General Availability” to “Bookable when staff are free.” As long as individual faculty have checked the box on their profile indicating that they want their Outlook calendars to be synced with Bookings, this setting takes both the Outlook calendar and the availability in Bookings into account when showing students what is possible for scheduling.
“Set different availability for a date range” - Select this blue link to make the future impossible to schedule past a certain date (such as the last day of the term). Set the dropdown to “Not Bookable.” At the end of one term, change the start date of time that is not bookable to the end of the next term. In this way, students will see one term at a time to make appointments, as the default. In the example above , the spring term ends 6/6/2020. Students can book up to 70 days in the future during the spring term but only up until 6/6/2020. From 6/6/2020 to 6/5/2021 is not bookable. At the beginning of the fall term, change the setup so that that the non-bookable date is set to start at the end of the fall term, for example.

Region and time zone settings - Leave the checkbox blank to allow students in different time zones to see the appointment in their own time zone.

"Staff" Options in a Setup

Use this option in the left menu to "Add Staff" via the button at the top of your window or select the pencil icon next to a staff member's name. After selecting or adding staff, you see the staff details page.

Availability - Select the “Events on Office365 calendar affect availability” box so that any event on the staff or faculty member’s Outlook calendar prevents Bookings from suggesting that time to a student. Leave un-checked the “use business hours” box, as this would make the faculty or staff member potentially appear available 8-5 M-F. The weekdays listed in the Availability section can be set to certain times and certain days.

"Services" Options in a Setup

Services, such as “Study Abroad Advising,” “Language Placement Testing,” “Major Advising,” or “Petition to Graduate," can be created as topics for student-faculty appointments. Tthese topics can have standard durations ranging from 15-60 minutes, based on topic.

Select “Add Service” at the top of your window or select the pencil icon next to a service’s name to modify its details.

Publishing Options - If you leave the box checked, the service appears on the Bookings page for any student with access to the page. An unpublished service can be distributed privately with the link at the top of the page in email.
Default Location of the service is the same for any faculty member that offers the service. Therefore, if you have faculty members who are offering the same service but in different offices (or different Zoom meetings), you can instead have each faculty member have their own service and then list those either publicly or privately on the Department Bookings page.
Buffer Time - This is the amount of time before or after an appointment for prep or note taking and cannot be booked. It is time in addition to the default duration.
"Let the customer manage their booking" means that they can reschedule or cancel. We recommend that you check this box and let students communicate changes in the system.
Custom Fields are questions that can be asked based on a student selection of a service from the menu they see. You can ask questions that allow responses in a plain text format or that provide a dropdown of possible responses. You can also remove default questions from the list the student sees, and you can make any question required. Select the “Modify” button to open the window for custom fields.
Default Price dropdown should be set to “Price not set” to remove any confusion about cost so that this is not visible to students.
Reminders and Confirmations are emails that are sent out to students and/or faculty and staff about upcoming appointments. When the reminder is sent can be set along with any custom language. Add as many kinds of reminders as you need. If you have reminders that require specific paperwork or assignments, you can enter those details here.
"Use the default scheduling policy" - We recommend that you do NOT check this box. Checking the box does NOT allow for variability of time durations for different appointment types. Unless your service matches the defaults exactly, you should leave this box blank.
"Maximum lead time" - You may want to leave these the same as the defaults—only the duration of the present term or, for example, 70 days.

Publishing Bookings to Students

Send students the Bookings links either:

as links to individual services on the Department's web site (recommended) OR
via the department-published “Bookings Page” itself

The Bookings Page provides a menu of all that the department offers for advising. However, when there are many services, the Bookings Page can be difficult to navigate. Instead, we recommend that the links to individual services be made available on the Department’s web site in sections devoted to advising or near the faculty’s individual directory listings. Bbuttons can be added (named “schedule,” for example) that can link out to MS Bookings scheduling pages for individual services. These buttons can be added, via the Cascade content management system (CMS), to the Department’s website.

Bookings page screenshot — ***Sample published, and simple, version of the MS Bookings "Bookings Page."***

We recommend using the Department’s website as the vehicle for communicating to students that they are to schedule advising via Bookings so that students will be driven to read the Department’s website. The Department’s website can also provide clarity about options available. The “Bookings Page” in Bookings itself, conversely, is not the ideal method for communicating nuanced detail about all of the advising services a department may offer.