Features

Booking Planner is a floor-plan booking surface that runs inside SharePoint, with everything else that the booking flow drags along with it. The floor plan and the list view share the same data. The booking dialog can pull catering and AV requests into the same reservation. The Outlook calendar event is created when you confirm. Reception staff and Executive Assistants book on behalf of others through Azure AD-backed roles. External visitors can be pre-registered from an Outlook calendar invite and checked in at the desk. The admin panel turns floor-plan configuration from a spreadsheet job into a drawing one. The pages below walk through each of those, with screenshots from the actual product.

Two ways to book

Pick the layout that suits the moment. Both views read from the same data, so switching never costs you anything.

A toggle at the top of the web part switches between the two. Same data, same filters, same updates: just two ways of looking at the same office.

Three time slots, not endless dropdowns

Booking Planner uses fixed time slots so booking is predictable and the conversation is consistent across the team.

Morning

9:00 AM to 1:00 PM. The slot for early-shift workers, school-run parents, and morning collaboration.

Afternoon

1:00 PM to 5:00 PM. The slot for afternoon meetings, post-lunch focus time, and split-shift workers.

Full Day

9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. The default for a normal office day, and the slot most users pick.

You can book up to three months ahead. One booking per slot per user; the system blocks overlapping bookings so nobody can hoard the best desk for the whole month.

Book in seconds without leaving the page

Booking Planner is built around the gesture: click a desk on the plan and the booking dialog opens with date and time pre-filled.

Find what is free, fast

A booking view is only useful if the right space surfaces quickly.

• Real-time availability computed against current bookings. Colour-coded on the plan: green available, red booked, blue your booking, grey inactive
• Date and time-block filtering narrows the plan to what is free for your chosen slot. No mental arithmetic on overlapping reservations
• Multi-location filter by building, floor, and room type. One product covers your whole estate
• Hot desk and meeting room in a single interface. Switch the filter, click the space
• Bookmarkable URLs for every floor and room: ?floor=1&room=5 deep-links you straight back to the surface you cared about. Share with a colleague, paste into a meeting invite
• Clear empty states when nothing matches your filter, so a user knows whether the desks are all gone or the filter is too tight

My Bookings: your personal queue

Every booking you make lives in your personal My Bookings page. See every upcoming reservation in date order; show or hide history; download the calendar event for any booking; cancel with one click. Direct edits aren’t supported (cancel-and-rebook is the model); the cancellation releases the desk for the next person immediately.

Workspace setup, visually

The single biggest setup decision is the floor plan itself. Booking Planner makes it a drawing job, not a configuration spreadsheet.

Floor-plan images can come from three sources: upload from your computer, pick from the existing SharePoint Shared Documents library, or paste a URL. The image goes straight into your tenant’s document library, so it’s governed alongside the rest of your SharePoint content. Edit boundaries any time the office layout changes; bookings continue to work as the plan evolves.

QR check-in for utilisation data you can trust

A booking is intent; a check-in is reality. Without check-in, your utilisation reports are bookings, not occupancy.

• Permanent QR codes generated per desk, printable to vinyl or NFC stickers. The QR never changes, even as bookings come and go
• Scan to check in on the user’s own phone, in seconds. The check-in marks the booking as fulfilled in the underlying list
• NFC tap supported on devices that read passive NFC, for users who prefer tap to scan
• Utilisation data follows reality. Bookings that were never checked in show as no-shows in the reports, so facilities planning is grounded in what actually happened

Services bundling: catering and AV with the room

Meeting room bookings can bundle services right inside the booking dialog. Catering, AV, and any other configurable service appears alongside the room with a status badge (Requested, Approved, In Progress, Completed, or Cancelled). Admins manage the service catalogue, and the booking flow brings the services into the conversation at the right moment.

Visitor management: from invite to reception

The Visitor Management module bridges the digital booking world and the physical building. When a meeting is scheduled in Outlook with external attendees, the system can pre-register those attendees as visitors, send them a welcome email with arrival details, and notify the host via Microsoft Teams when they check in at reception.

Three visitor types

External visitors are traditional guests: clients, vendors, consultants. They get the full welcome flow with pre-arrival email, reception check-in, and optional temporary badge or QR for touchless building access.

Internal visitors are colleagues from a different office. Useful for capacity planning and emergency response: security knows who is in the building today.

Contractors are between the two. Regular access without full employee privileges; the system tracks visit patterns and host relationships over time.

The lifecycle in the system

Every visitor moves through the states: Expected, Checked In, Checked Out, with No Show for visitors who never arrived. Reception can search and check in with one click; the host gets a rich Teams card with action buttons (“On my way”, “Ask them to wait”). Notification frequency is configurable per host to prevent fatigue at large gatherings.

For emergency evacuation, the system can generate a report of all currently checked-in visitors by location. Badge tracking ensures temporary visitor badges are accounted for and returned.

The visitor module is built on a solid services foundation today; the reception kiosk, host dashboard, and full Outlook auto-registration ship progressively alongside the Microsoft Marketplace listing. Pilots can preview the full surface during their evaluation window.

Role-based permissions for reception and assistants

Some teams need someone other than the desk owner to make a booking. Executive Assistants book for the exec they support; reception books for a visitor walking in. Booking Planner ships role-based permissions backed by Azure AD security groups.

Roles are assigned via Azure AD security groups (configured in the admin panel using the exact group display name). Microsoft Graph API permissions for User.Read.All and GroupMember.Read.All are required and consented through the SharePoint Admin Center.

Group Calendar Integration

When an assistant or reception creates a booking on behalf of someone else, the Outlook calendar event can land in a shared M365 Group or Shared Mailbox calendar instead of the creator’s personal calendar. This gives the whole reception or assistant team a single visibility surface for the bookings they manage, while still attributing the booking to the right user.

• Routes on-behalf bookings into a shared M365 Group or Shared Mailbox calendar (admin-configurable)
• Falls back to personal calendar if the group calendar is unavailable or disabled
• Audit trail preserved: every on-behalf booking records who created it and for whom
• Centralised visibility: reception teams see every on-behalf booking they made, in one calendar

Lives where your team already works

Mobile note: Outlook on iOS currently has a platform-level issue (a Microsoft platform bug, not specific to Booking Planner) that prevents SPFx apps from loading. Until Microsoft resolves it, the recommended mobile workflow is the Microsoft Teams mobile app, which works fully, or Outlook Web on the device’s browser.

Admin panel for facilities and operations

The admin panel gives facilities and operations teams the visibility they need to plan space, set policy, and intervene when things go wrong.

• Utilisation metrics computed against actual check-ins (via QR), not just bookings. Filter by building, floor, room type
• Booking overview with filters by date range, floor, room, user. Export for finance and workspace strategy
• Floor management: add, rename, delete floors. Background image management for visual floor plans
• Room management: create rooms inside floors with size (1x1 to 20x20 grid), optional background image, polygon boundaries on the floor plan
• Desk grid editor: visual square-grid placement, click to add, click to edit, drag to reposition
• Bulk desk actions: activate or deactivate many desks at once, clear all desks in a room

Compatibility and accessibility

What we have said no to (so far)

Workspace tooling is a category that swells unchecked if you let it. Booking Planner has a clear line on what belongs inside the booking flow and what doesn’t. The list below is the running record of feature requests we have declined, with the reason in each case. Some of these are open questions that may shift if customer demand makes the case.

No recurring bookings yet

Frequent customer ask; coming in the v2 wave. Today each booking is made individually. Workaround: book the same desk for the days you need in one session of the flow.

No direct booking edit

To change an existing booking, cancel it from My Bookings and create a new one. Direct field-by-field edit isn’t supported on purpose; cancel-and-rebook keeps the audit trail simple and frees the original slot immediately.

No two-way Outlook calendar sync yet

Today the sync is one-way: a booking creates an Outlook event. Full two-way sync (Outlook event changes flowing back to the SharePoint booking) is planned for the v2 wave with the Outlook plugin upgrade.

No standalone mobile app

Booking Planner runs in any modern mobile browser and in the Teams mobile app. We have not shipped a separate iOS or Android app because the mobile web experience is good enough and avoids a second install per user.

No catering or AV provider integration

The Services Module tracks Catering and AV requests against bookings, with status tracking through to Completed. Integration with a specific catering provider’s order system is out of scope; Booking Planner gives your catering team the queue, not the supply chain.

No client-side export beyond SharePoint native

SharePoint lists already export to Excel natively, and that export is more trustworthy than anything we could generate client-side from a filtered view of bookings.

A booking surface stays useful by being narrow at the front and pragmatic at the edges. The list above is the boundary; the surface itself is what comes through it.

Licensing tiers

Booking Planner is available in three tiers. All tiers include floor-plan booking; higher tiers unlock admin tooling, multi-location, services, and the visitor management module.

Free is enough to book a desk from a floor plan on a single SharePoint page, with calendar download.

Standard adds meeting room booking, the list view, multi-location, automatic Outlook event creation, the Teams tab, QR check-in, and the Services Module for catering and AV bundled with room bookings.

Enterprise adds the admin panel, floor-plan drawing tools, drag-and-drop desk editor, utilisation metrics, booking rules, tenant-wide visibility, role-based permissions for reception and assistants, on-behalf bookings, group calendar routing, and the Visitor Management module.

Tier enforcement will be enforced when the licensing flow lights up alongside the Microsoft Marketplace listing. A 30-day Enterprise trial is included on every install once we ship.

Ready to put your office on a floor plan?

Booking Planner is coming to the Microsoft commercial marketplace. Pilot today with the full Enterprise surface; install on your tenant when the listing goes live.

Join the pilotSee pricing