Venues & facilities
Microsoft 365 components for venues, facilities and shared workspaces
The rooms are already booked in Exchange. This puts the same room mailboxes on your public website, so somebody outside the organisation can see what is free and take it.
What it reads, what the builder controls, and the markup it produces — on one page, with no signup in the way.
Outlook Booking A drawing of the component, not a screenshot
Who this is for
Anywhere a room, a hall or a desk is bookable in Outlook.
Conference and event venues, coworking and serviced offices, community centres and church halls, studios and sports facilities, and the facilities teams who run meeting rooms on behalf of everyone else in the building.
The gap
Exchange already knows which room is free. The website is the part that does not.
Rooms, equipment and people are scheduled in Outlook, as resource mailboxes, and that arrangement works — right up to the point where the person who wants the room is outside the organisation. Then the availability lives somewhere they cannot see, and the booking becomes an email thread.
Microsoft Bookings answers this for appointments and brings its own licence and setup with it. A room is not an appointment: it is a resource that has to be added to the meeting so it shows as taken in every other calendar in the building.
The components
What a facilities team puts in front of a hirer.
Every one of these reads a source the organisation already maintains, and each is configured per instance in a builder before it goes on the page. All of them are released today.
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Outlook Booking
<wpi-outlook-booking>Works with Outlook user calendars · Exchange room and resource mailboxes
Room mode. The visitor picks a room and the room mailbox joins the meeting as a resource, so it shows as booked in Outlook like any other reservation. Rooms can be listed explicitly with their own labels and colours, or discovered from the tenant’s own room mailboxes.
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Calendar
<wpi-calendar>Works with Outlook user and group calendars · SharePoint Events lists · Published ICS feeds · Any JSON REST endpoint
What is already on. The venue’s public events calendar, read from the same Outlook or SharePoint source the team maintains, with the popover composed so a public listing carries what you want it to carry and nothing else.
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Form Builder
<wpi-form>Works with A Microsoft 365 mailbox with Mail.Send, for email delivery · Webhook endpoints · Your own SMTP server
The enquiry that is not a booking — catering, layout, access requirements, hire periods that do not fit a slot. Conditional rules keep it short, and a calculation field can total a day rate before anyone picks up the phone.
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Documents
<wpi-documents>Works with SharePoint document libraries · OneDrive for Business
Floor plans, capacity charts, hire agreements and risk assessments, published from the SharePoint library facilities already keeps them in — with downloads switchable off for anything that should be read but not circulated.
Half the hires never fit a slot.
A whole-day booking, an unusual layout, catering, access requirements — the enquiries a slot picker cannot express. The form asks the follow-up question only when the answer warrants it, and can total a day rate before anyone picks up the phone.
Both ends of one booking
What the visitor sees, and what the building sees.
A room booking is only useful if it is true on both sides of the wall. These are the same event described twice.
- On the website: only the rooms that are free
- Slots are offered where the chosen room is genuinely free according to its own free/busy, so a reservation cannot land on top of an existing commitment. Working hours, the days that accept bookings, and the timezone those hours are expressed in are all yours to set.
- On the website: your own intake questions
- The booking form uses the same typed fields as the Form Builder, conditional rules included, so you can ask what the hire actually requires — expected numbers, layout, catering — rather than what a generic booking form assumes.
- In the tenant: an ordinary Outlook event
- The confirmed booking is a normal calendar event with the room mailbox attached as a resource. Everyone else in the building sees the room as taken, in the calendar they already use, with no second system to check.
- In the tenant: the invitation, and then nothing kept
- Enable it and the booker is added as an attendee, so Outlook sends them its own invitation. Their intake answers are listed in the dashboard for seven days and then deleted — the meeting itself is permanent and unaffected.
In figures
The booking rules you get to set.
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Two
booking arrangements
A step-by-step wizard that asks one thing per screen, or a month calendar with a persistent room selector and time slots shown inline.
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180 days
the longest booking window
How far ahead the widget will offer slots is a setting, up to a hundred and eighty days out.
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15 minutes
the shortest bookable slot
Slot length runs from a quarter of an hour to two hours, with separate buffers before and after each reservation.
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Two
ways we reach your tenant
Managed, where your administrator consents once — or proxy, where your own gateway holds the credentials.
Tell us how your rooms are set up.
The component platform is in pre-launch, so there is no signup for it yet and interest arrives as email that somebody reads. The WordPress plugin store is open today and sells the same Microsoft 365 jobs inside WordPress.
Questions
What people ask before they commit to this.
Do we need a Microsoft Bookings licence?
No. Outlook Booking works against ordinary Outlook calendars and Exchange room and resource mailboxes, which you already have if your rooms are bookable in Outlook today.
Can two people book the same room?
No. Slots are offered only where the chosen room is genuinely free according to its own free/busy, and the confirmed booking adds the room mailbox to the meeting as a resource — so the room is taken everywhere, not just in our record of it.
Can we take payment for a hire?
No. There is no payment step in any component today: the booking is taken, the details are delivered to a mailbox or webhook, and invoicing happens in whatever you already use for it. A form can calculate and display a day rate, but it does not collect money.
Can visitors see who has booked a room?
Only if you publish that separately and deliberately. Outlook Booking writes the reservation; it does not publish the calendar. Showing what is on is the Calendar component reading a source you choose, and its popover fields — organiser, description, location — are individually switchable.
Can we stop somebody booking for an hour’s time?
Yes. A minimum-notice setting in hours removes slots too close to now, and buffers before and after each reservation keep back-to-back bookings apart so facilities have turnaround time.
How does the widget know which rooms exist?
Either way round. List them explicitly with your own labels and colours, or let them be discovered from the tenant’s room mailboxes — which means a room added in Exchange is a room the widget can offer.