To give people outside your company a link that books a Microsoft Teams meeting with you, use a booking page that writes the meeting into your Outlook calendar with a Teams link attached. Microsoft's own options are Bookings with me in Outlook for one-to-one meetings and Microsoft Bookings for shared team pages, and a scheduling tool connected to Outlook can do the same with qualifying questions and several hosts on one invite. The guest needs no Teams account: they open the link in the invitation and join from a browser.
The three routes differ in who can be on the meeting, what the booker is asked first, and what each person on your side needs licensed. The guest's experience is nearly identical across all three, and so are the two meeting settings worth checking before a customer joins.
Option 1: Bookings with me, for one person
Bookings with me is the personal booking page built into Outlook on the web. You set meeting types and the hours you are available, share a link, and anybody can book, including people without a Microsoft account. A meeting type can use a Teams meeting as its location, so each booking lands in your Outlook calendar with a join link already on it.
Two limits decide whether it fits. Microsoft's FAQ says the organiser needs a Bookings licence, and that Bookings with me can only be used for one-to-one meetings. If a second person from your side needs to be on the call, it is the wrong tool, however convenient the link is.
Option 2: Microsoft Bookings, for a shared page
Microsoft Bookings is the team version: a booking page with services, staff and custom fields. With Teams as your online meeting service, turn on Add online meeting for a service, and each booking gets a meeting link unique to that appointment, added to both the staff member's calendar and the customer's.
It can also put several people on one appointment. A service set to Multiple staff books all of its assigned staff together, and Microsoft's documentation says the booking can only be made when all of them are available. Every staff member booked into an online meeting needs a Teams licence that lets them create meetings.
What Bookings does not do is decide. Custom fields collect answers that appear with the appointment, and Microsoft's documentation does not describe using them to turn anybody away. Every visitor who finds the page can book any time it offers.
Option 3: a scheduling tool connected to Outlook
A scheduling tool that connects to Outlook through Microsoft Graph can create the same Teams meeting, because a Teams link on an Outlook event is a property of the event itself. Setupp sets two fields on the event it writes, isOnlineMeeting and onlineMeetingProvider, and Microsoft attaches the join link. There is no separate Teams connection and no second consent screen.
What a tool adds is everything around the booking: questions that run before any times appear, rules that decide whether times appear at all, several hosts on one invitation, and a score on each booking. Setupp writes one event on a connected Outlook calendar with every host and the booker as required attendees, and Outlook itself sends the invitation, any update and any cancellation.
Hosts do not all have to be on Microsoft. If your team is split between Outlook and Google Calendar, Setupp reads free and busy time from both and writes the meeting to one host's connected calendar: a Teams link when that calendar is a Microsoft 365 work or school account, a Google Meet link when it is Google.
What the guest sees
The guest receives a calendar invitation from Outlook with a Join the meeting now link. They do not need a Teams account or the Teams app. Microsoft's guidance is to open the link, choose Continue on this browser, and join; its article lists Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome as the supported browsers. Anybody who joins without signing in is labelled Unverified in the meeting.
Two settings on your side change that experience, so check them before a customer meets them.
- The lobby. Depending on your meeting settings, an outside guest may wait in the lobby until somebody admits them, and Microsoft says a guest nobody admits within 30 minutes is removed. If your host joins late from another call, that is how a prospect ends up waiting alone.
- Joining without signing in. Some organisations' admin settings stop people who are not signed in from joining at all. If yours does, every guest is asked to sign in first, and some of them will not.
- Book a slot on your own page with a personal email address.
- Open the invitation in a private browser window.
- Join as a guest, and note every screen you pass on the way in.
Five minutes, and everything a prospect will meet, you will have met first.
Two things that break Teams links
Personal Microsoft accounts
The Teams link that Microsoft's calendar API puts on an event needs a work or school Microsoft 365 account. A personal Outlook.com or Hotmail calendar cannot create one, and Microsoft refuses the whole event when asked to, so Setupp writes the event without a link rather than losing the booking, and never invents a join address to fill the gap. Everything else works on a personal account: Setupp reads its busy times and puts the meeting on it. For a Teams link on every booking, connect a work or school Microsoft 365 calendar. Otherwise set the meeting's location to a phone call or a meeting link of your own.
Organisations that restrict which apps people connect
Connecting a calendar to any third-party tool means granting it permissions. By Microsoft's default, people can consent to apps for permissions that do not need an administrator, but Microsoft recommends allowing that only for apps from verified publishers, and some organisations switch it off altogether. In those organisations the connect screen asks for an administrator instead. An admin can approve the app once for the whole organisation, and each person then connects their own calendar as normal.
Setupp asks Microsoft for three permissions: offline_access, User.Read and Calendars.ReadWrite. The Teams link needs none of its own. They are printed on the Outlook Calendar integration page, so whoever approves them can read the list before anybody signs in.
Which one to use
- One person, no screening, and a Microsoft 365 plan that includes Bookings: Bookings with me. It is already in Outlook.
- A shared page where any of several colleagues can take the meeting, or all of them together: Microsoft Bookings.
- People turned away before they book, hosts on more than one calendar system, or a score on each booking: a scheduling tool connected to Outlook.
What Setupp costs for a Microsoft team
- One person on Outlook with Teams links: Free, $0, with every booking scored. Turning bookers away needs Pro.
- Two or three people who join calls together: Pro, $19 a month, with three hosts on one invite and the qualification gate.
- A sales team of four to ten, any one of whom can take the call: Team, $49 a month, which adds round-robin assignment.
The price is for the workspace, so four hosts on Team cost the same as ten. Each host still connects their own calendar, because a host whose calendar is not connected is a host whose busy time nobody can see.
Where Setupp fits
Setupp's Outlook Calendar and Microsoft Teams integrations are live: real free and busy time for every host, one event with all of them on it, and the Teams link generated on that event. Google Calendar and Google Meet work the same way for hosts on Google. Zoom is built and coming soon, so today the video options are Teams and Google Meet.
The details are on the Microsoft Teams integration page. If several people on your side need to be on the call, the multi-host page shows how one invitation carries all of them, and round-robin versus collective scheduling explains why a meeting that needs everybody has fewer slots than one that needs anybody. Plans are on pricing, and the Calendly comparison runs the per-seat arithmetic with your own numbers.
If your guests are in other time zones, the post on time zones covers the Microsoft Graph quirk that shifts a meeting by exactly the UTC offset, and how to avoid it.