Shared Bookings vs Bookings with me: which should you use?

Microsoft Bookings comes in two versions. They look alike but work very differently. Bookings with me (Microsoft's docs now also call it Personal Bookings) is a feature of Outlook: one person, 1:1 meetings, set up in minutes. Shared Bookings creates a booking page for a team, with staff, services, custom questions, an embed code and an API. This guide sets them side by side, gives a rule for choosing, and explains how to move from one to the other. It's for anyone deciding how to put a "book time with us" link in front of clients, students or colleagues. Reading and deciding takes about 15 minutes.

The short answer#

• Use Bookings with me if one person needs to share their free time for simple 1:1 meetings and doesn't need to ask the booker anything beyond name and email.
• Use a shared booking page if more than one person takes the meetings, or you need required questions, a page you can embed, reports, automation, or control over who can book. That applies even when only one person is bookable.

Side-by-side comparison (as of September 2026)#

Sources: Microsoft's Personal Bookings FAQ, shared Bookings FAQ, add-staff, add-questions, granular controls and Graph overview pages. Where the table says "not documented", Microsoft hasn't said the feature is unsupported. It just doesn't appear in the docs, and users report it's missing.

When Bookings with me is the right call#

Bookings with me is the quickest way to stop email back-and-forth. The page is published automatically with two meeting types, "15 mins meeting" and "30 mins meeting". For each meeting type you can set:

• a name, description and colour category
• online (Teams) or in-person mode
• the duration and public/private visibility
• your Outlook working hours or custom hours per weekday
• buffers before and after
• minimum and maximum lead time
• reminder emails

Private meeting types don't appear on your page. You share them by direct link, which suits things like "30-minute follow-up for existing clients only". Single-use links let you send a slot offer that can't be passed around.

It suits:

• Account managers, consultants and academics who meet people one at a time
• Internal "grab 15 minutes with me" links in an email signature
• People who can't create shared pages because an admin has restricted page creation

The recurring complaints about Bookings with me are authentication friction and missing controls:

• Verification code. Bookers can be asked for an email verification code, and some see a "Sign in / Continue as guest" screen. There is no documented setting to turn either off. The main Q&A thread about the code has 130 "same question" votes. See turning off the Bookings with me verification code.
• No required questions. You can't make someone give a phone number or a reason for booking. See custom questions on Bookings with me.
• No daily cap and no list of bookings. You can't limit bookings per day, and there's no list of who has booked. Both are open Feedback Portal ideas.
• No location choice. The booker can't pick between locations. You create one meeting type per location instead.

When you need a shared booking page#

Choose a shared page as soon as any of these apply:

1. More than one person takes the meetings. Customers pick a named person or "Anyone". Note that "Anyone" assigns staff randomly. Microsoft says there is "no way to ensure equal distribution". For fairer assignment, see the any-available-staff guide.
2. You need information before the meeting. Custom questions are set per service, can be required, and are saved in a list you can reuse across services.
3. The page has to live on your website. Microsoft only documents iframe embedding for shared pages. See embedding Bookings with me for what does and doesn't work.
4. Other systems need the bookings. Graph, the Power Automate connector and the TSV export all work only with shared pages.
5. You need to control who books. Restrict booking to people in your organisation, turn off search indexing, collect consent with a timestamp, and set business hours, lead times and buffers for everyone at once.
6. Someone else manages your diary. Bookings with me has no delegation, so an assistant has to be added to a shared page instead.

The costs of a shared page:

• Every page is an Exchange mailbox, so admins end up managing them.
• Only Microsoft 365 admins can delete a page.
• The URL comes from the mailbox's SMTP address and is hard to change later.
• Microsoft states there is "no consolidated view" of all pages in a tenant.

How to "convert" from Bookings with me to a shared page#

Microsoft doesn't document any convert or migration tool, and the standard answer on Microsoft Q&A is to rebuild. The steps:

1. In Bookings, go to Shared booking pages and select Create booking page (from scratch, or clone an existing page).
2. Enter the business name, logo and business hours. Invite no one else if you'll be the only bookable person.
3. Rebuild each meeting type as a service:
   • same duration, buffers and lead time
   • Add online meeting on if it was a Teams meeting type
   • add your custom questions under Custom fields
4. Recreate private meeting types as services with Publishing options off. The service stays hidden from the page but keeps its own direct link.
5. On the Staff page, check that Events on Microsoft 365 calendar affect availability is on for you (some docs label it "Events on Office 365 calendar affect availability"). That way the shared page respects the same Outlook calendar your personal page did.
6. Publish, test a booking from a private browser window, then replace your old link in your email signature and website.
7. Leave the personal page running until the old link is out of circulation, then delete it yourself from the Bookings menu. Both pages read the same Outlook calendar, so a booking made on one blocks that time on the other while they overlap.

For a full walk-through of building the new page, see setting up a shared booking page.

Admin controls: what IT can and can't govern#

Shared pages have the most controls. In the Microsoft 365 admin center, go to Settings → Org settings → Bookings. The available settings include:

• Block shared bookings from outside your organization
• Block social sharing options
• Block sharing staff details with customers
• Require staff approvals before sharing free/busy information
• Allow Microsoft to send SMS messages
• Disable direct search engine indexing
• Enforce a naming policy for page aliases
• Restrict collection of customer data

Changes "may take up to four hours to apply".

To limit who can create shared pages, set BookingsMailboxCreationEnabled:$false on an OWA mailbox policy. Users without the permission can still be added as staff. To list every page, run Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails SchedulingMailbox.

Bookings with me has one switch:

Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -Identity "OwaMailboxPolicy-Default" -PersonalBookingsDisabled $true

For per-user control, create a separate policy with New-OwaMailboxPolicy and assign it with Set-CASMailbox -OwaMailboxPolicy. Microsoft retired the EWS-based controls on August 5, 2026 (MC1418559). Set-OrganizationConfig and Set-CASMailbox EWS settings no longer affect personal pages. Bookings with me keeps working even if shared Bookings is turned off for the organisation, as long as the user has the Bookings app enabled. A Feedback Portal idea notes that admins can't restrict who books a personal page from outside the organisation.

Licensing#

Microsoft says the two "share the same licensing model":

• The organizer of a personal page, or the creator of a shared page, needs a plan that includes Bookings. The FAQ lists Microsoft 365 A3, A5, E1, E3, E5, F1, F3, Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium, Teams Essentials and Teams Premium, and the Office 365 A, E, F and G equivalents.
• A1 isn't on the list. Users with only A1 report they can't open Bookings with me.
• People who book need no licence or Microsoft account.
• Staff on a shared page can be added with any email address. Staff from outside the organisation are Guests, and their calendars aren't read for availability.

More detail is in which licence you need for Bookings.

A simple decision rule#

Ask three questions:

1. Will anyone other than me ever be bookable on this link?
2. Do I need to ask the booker a required question?
3. Does this page need to go on a website or feed another system?

If all three answers are no, use Bookings with me. If any answer is yes, create a single-page shared booking page now. It saves rebuilding later.

Doing this with BookingsXP#

BookingsXP puts a branded, auto-resizing booking widget on your website, with conversion tracking, and it fully supports shared booking pages. You paste the public page link, and it needs no Microsoft sign-in or admin consent. Bookings with me pages are supported on a best-effort basis only. If embedding or tracking matters to you, that's one more reason to choose a shared page. See /features/embed. BookingsXP is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.