Over the past few months we have seen instances of shared bookings sites disappear from users Microsoft Bookings landing page. This appears to happen for a few reasons two of which we cover in this post.
When a user is added to a shared bookings instance in Microsoft Bookings the user will receive a welcome e-mail from the administrator of the shared bookings instance they were added to.
This e-mail contains a link to the shared bookings instance, when the user clicks on the link a card for the shared bookings instance is added to the users Microsoft Bookings landing page under shared bookings.
However, there seems to be an issue where the cards that are added to the landing page disappear. We have seen this happen because
- The users list of shared bookings seems to loose items
- The site title of the shared bookings instance has been sent to empty or null
The problem here is that administrators and staff members with appropriate roles are unable to access the back-end of the Shared Bookings site.
The users list of shared bookings seems to loose items
Users may not initially notice that one of their shared bookings site cards has disappeared and this issue only seems to affect some of the sites users not all of them at the same time.
Having double checked that the Shared Bookings instance exists by using PowerShell. To get a list of all of your Shared Bookings instances you can use
Get-exoMailbox -RecipientTypeDetails SchedulingMailbox -ResultSize: Unlimited | select DisplaynameYou can also check the user is still a valid staff member for the site you can force bookings by using MgGraph.
get-mgbookingBusinessStaffMember -BookingBusinessId e-mail address of shared bookings instance | select * To add the card to the Microsoft Bookings landing page by clicking on the link in the welcome message that the user received when they were added by the administrator.
If the user is unable to find their welcome e-mail they can work out the URL which is currently the following format.
https://outlook.office.com/bookings?calendar=e-mail address of shared bookings instance&action=goto&src=mail-goto
Where the e-mail address of shared bookings instance is the UPN of the shared bookings mailbox. To get the e-mail address of the shared booking instance you can use
get-exomailbox -identity "name of shared bookings instance" | select userprincipalnameCopy and paste the URL into a browser and the shared bookings site card will then be added to the Microsoft Bookings landing page for the user.
If the card does not appear check the permissions of the staff member for the shared bookings instance and that the e-mail address is correct for the site.
The missing title issue
On some of the Shared Bookings sites we have noticed that the site title has somehow been set to empty or null, normally after an update to Bookings. When this happens the card representing the shared bookings instance fails to display when the Microsoft Bookings landing page is rendered. Unfortunately, no error is shown.
If you try the solution for the previous issue the card will be added back to the users landing page. However the card will not display a site title, the next time the users visits the Microsoft Bookings landing page the card will have disappeared again.
The solution is to add the card again and immediately change the shared bookings site settings and enter the site title again and save the changes.
Now when you try to add the card again using the previous method it will be displayed correctly.