Microsoft Bookings is an online and mobile app for small businesses who provide services to customers on an appointment basis. Examples of businesses include hair salons, dental offices, spas, law firms, financial services providers, consultants, and auto shops.

Bookings has three primary components:

• A booking page where your customers can schedule appointments with the staff member who should provide the service. You can show this page on Facebook, where your customers can schedule appointments, or your own web site.
• A set of web-based, business-facing pages where business owners can record customer preferences, manage staff lists and schedules, define services and pricing, set business hours, and customize how services and staff are scheduled
• A business-facing mobile app where business owners can see all of their bookings, access customer lists and contact information, and make manual bookings

 

Microsoft To Do is a cloud-based task management application. It allows users to manage their tasks from a smartphone, tablet and computer. The technology is produced by the team behind, which was acquired by Microsoft, and the stand-alone apps feed into the existing Tasks feature of the Outlook product range.



The simplest explanation is that it’s a way to organise teamwork and tasks – similar to Asana, Slack or Trello for task/ project management. Office 365 Planner provides a hub for team members to create plans, organise and assign tasks to different users and to check updates on progress through dashboards. It also provides a centralised place where files can be shared and gives visibility to the whole team. As an Office 365 app, you can find Planner within your Office 365 home under your apps. 



Power Automate (was known as Flow) is Microsoft’s attempt at giving you the kind of automation for notifications, alerts, data gathering, and communication that will help you spend less time on boring but necessary admin work and more time on interesting (and productive) things.

Think of Power Automate as IFTTT (If This Then That), but with a slant towards the Office applications rather than IoT (internet of things) or hardware.

Power Automate allows you to create “flows” (short for “workflows”) that are based on trigger events. For example, you could create a flow that would download the responses to a Microsoft Forms questionnaire to Dropbox regularly, or post a message in a Slack channel if a Visual Studio build fails.

Flow is all about taking away the annoyance of tasks that a computer could be doing for you instead. This could be as simple as getting an email alert when someone modifies a file in Dropbox or as complex as a multi-step workflow with approvals, alerts, and notifications that’s based on a Power BI analysis of real-time data.

You can create three main types of flow:

• Automated: A flow triggered automatically by an event, like an email arriving or a file changing.
• Button: A flow triggered manually by a button you press.
• Scheduled: A flow that runs at a set time, either once or as a recurring action.