There’s a few Office 365 features that were released only for Business customers; there’s a nice list of all the Office 365 Features and what subscription they sit under on Technet. The good news is that they’re coming to Enterprise customers too!

The first service to be available is called Bookings which lets you build a booking system for your customers to use. There’s actually a lot to it – you can set rates, who’s available, what times to book, what sort of appointments customers can choose.. I can see it being a big benefit to a small business to have a very easy to configure and professional booking system.

I can see why Microsoft originally didn’t let Enterprise customers have this product – it’s not going to work well if you have 1000 staff that can be booked using it, and have more complex requirements.

Regardless, I’m sure many Enterprise customers want to at least have a look at a new free addon that’s part of their subscription.

There’s a few steps to getting access to Bookings, and it’s different to other products such as Teams. Again, Microsoft have a Technet Guide on getting Bookings but here’s the abbreviated version;

In Office 365 Admin, go to Billing > Purchase Services. Find Business Apps (it’s near the bottom), and follow the bouncing ball from the ‘Buy Now’ button which shows up when you hover over or click the Business Apps tile. It’s a bit strange to go through a purchase process for an E3/E5 subscription.

Although there’s an option to “Automatically assign to all of your users with no licenses” I found that at the end of the process, nobody actually had the license applied. You’ll need to follow your normal license allocation procedure (which at the basic level, can be choosing a user from the admin console, going to Product Licenses, finding ‘Business Apps’ and changing the switch to ‘on’).

I also hit an issue when going through the purchase process when choosing to pay. I had the message ‘Sign-in required For security reasons, please try signing in again. If you receive this notification again, a specific browser setting is preventing you from utilizing this page. Please follow this support article to fix the issue.’ Trying again ended up going in a loop to see that message. Google Chrome I couldn’t resolve this; Internet Explorer however, set your browser settings as per the support article but then completely close all IE windows, or it doesn’t seem to work.

Once you’ve purchased, it only takes a minute or less for the licenses to appear. As above, make sure you’ve then checked and applied the license to an account you plan to test on. The app itself may take longer to show up in the dots menu, but you can go direct to bookings.office.com and you will hopefully see a page like this:

From there, you can start to check out settings and configure it up!