Microsoft Bookings now available worldwide, now lets you connect your Office 365 calendar

Microsoft today announced some new improvements coming to its Bookings service on Office 365. The company is now rolling out Bookings to Office 365 Business Premium users who live outside of the United States and Canada, too.

The main highlight in the latest update for Bookings is the Office 365 integration: you can now connect your Office 365 calendar to Microsoft Bookings. What this essentially means is that Bookings will now look at your personal Office 365 calendar and prevent customers from booking an appointment when you are busy. This is certainly a much-needed feature, and it’s quite surprising to see this wasn’t present during the initial launch. Better late than never, I guess.

Another neat new feature coming to Bookings is the new buffer-time feature. With this feature enabled, you can get some extra preparation time between appointments and Bookings won’t let customers book appointments during that period.

And lastly, Microsoft is introducing some new customization features for Bookings. Users can now customize the primary accent color for their Bookings pages so that it reflects their own brand better. In addition to this, businesses can now show their brand’s logo on their Bookings pages too.

At the moment, Microsoft Bookings is only available for Office 365 users who subscribe to the Business Premium plan — but Microsoft says the company is planning on bringing the service to E3 and E5 customers in the “future.”