Microsoft Bookings with Me: What It Is and How to Use It (2026)
If you’re on Microsoft 365 and want to hand someone a link that lets them book time with you — the way Calendly works — you already have it. It’s called Bookings with me (Microsoft also calls it Personal Bookings), and it’s built into Outlook. Most people never turn it on because it’s buried behind the business-focused Microsoft Bookings app.
Here’s exactly what it is, how to use it, and the limits worth knowing before you rely on it.
What Bookings with me actually is
Bookings with me is a personal booking page for 1:1 meetings. You get a link, you share it, and someone picks an open slot from your real Outlook availability — no email back-and-forth, no exposing your whole calendar.
A few things that make it distinct:
- It’s individual, not shared. Bookings with me is for scheduling time with you. The regular Microsoft Bookings app is for a team or business with multiple staff and services. Same product family, different job.
- It reads your free/busy. The page only offers times you’re actually free, and confirmed bookings drop straight onto your Outlook calendar.
- Attendees need nothing. Anyone can book with you even if they don’t have a Microsoft account. You’re the only one who needs a license.
- It’s 1:1 only. Each meeting type books a single person into a slot. It can’t run a class, a group session, or round-robin across a team.
How to access it
There are two doors to the same page:
- On the web: go to book.ms and sign in with your work Microsoft account. Your Personal booking page is at the top.
- In Outlook or Teams: add the Bookings app to the left rail, open it, and select Personal booking page.
Your page is auto-published the first time you open it, with two default meeting types — a 15-minute meeting and a 30-minute meeting. You can edit those or add your own.
Setting up your page
The basics take about five minutes. (Full step-by-step: how to set up Bookings with me.)
- Meeting types — Create the appointment lengths you want to offer (a 15-min intro, a 45-min consult, and so on). Each has its own duration, location, and buffer.
- Availability — Switch from “use my calendar hours” to custom availability to control exactly which windows are bookable, independent of your working hours.
- Public vs. private — Public meeting types show up for anyone with your page link. Private meeting types only appear when you share that specific type, and can generate single-use links for one-off invites.
- Branding — Set a banner image so the page looks like yours.
Then copy your link and drop it in your email signature, a message, or a proposal.
What it costs
Bookings with me is included with most Microsoft 365 business and enterprise plans that have a Bookings license — Business Standard, Business Premium, E3/E5, and the equivalent education plans. It is not available on personal or family Microsoft 365 subscriptions, and there’s no standalone free version. If you can open the Bookings app in Outlook, you have it.
Where it falls short
Bookings with me is genuinely useful and free-if-you-already-pay-for-365. But it’s a thin slice of scheduling:
- 1:1 only. No group events, no round-robin, no team pages. For anything beyond “book time with me,” you’re back in the full Bookings app or looking at alternatives.
- A link is still a link. Every booking page trains the recipient to click an unfamiliar URL, browse your slots, and fill a form. Plenty of contacts — especially in security-conscious industries — quietly treat that like phishing.
- It can’t handle the messy requests. When someone emails “are you free sometime next week?” or forwards you an invite, a booking page does nothing. You still do that coordination by hand.
- Microsoft-only. It reads Outlook. If your world is Google Calendar or a mix, it’s a non-starter.
The link-free alternative: Carly
If the friction of a booking link is the part you don’t love, Carly takes a different approach. Carly is an AI scheduling assistant that works over email and SMS: forward it a “can we meet Thursday?” thread and it handles the back-and-forth, proposes times from your real availability, and books the meeting — no link for the other person to click.
And when you do want a shareable page, Carly includes a free booking page that works across Google and Outlook, so you’re not locked into the Microsoft ecosystem to hand someone a link. Carly starts at $35/month.
Thomas More — author, lawyer, and occasional saint.
Book a 30-min chat to talk philosophy, law, or Tudor-era politics.
Bookings with me is the right call if you live in Outlook and just need a simple personal link. If you want scheduling that also handles the requests a link can’t — or you’re not all-in on Microsoft — it’s worth comparing Bookings with me vs. Calendly and the link-free options before you settle.
Ready to automate your busywork?
Carly schedules, researches, and briefs you—so you can focus on what matters.
See what people say
"Before Carly, I relied on a Calendly link, but the whole process felt impersonal and not very professional. Carly changed that by handling all the back-and-forth, so I'm no longer stuck in endless email threads trying to line up schedules.
Now Carly reaches out to candidates, shares my real-time availability, lets them pick a slot, then sends a Zoom link and drops it straight into my calendar. She sends reminders to both of us before each call, which has significantly reduced no-shows and last-minute confusion.
On top of scheduling, Carly acts like a full executive assistant, sending me my schedule the night before so I can prepare for each call. It reminds me of the old x.ai assistant, but Carly is noticeably smarter, faster, and better suited to my healthcare recruitment business."
