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Working on the logic to display the time slots available for booking in Microsoft Bookings. I am confused about the concept of preBuffer and postBuffer. Are they part of the appointment duration?

Consider a store with business hours 08:00 to 17:00. A service is having a duration of 60 minutes. It's prebuffer is 5 minutes and postBuffer is 10 minutes. Does this mean that the total appointment duration is 75 minutes and slots should be allocated as 08:00 to 09:15, 09:15 to 10:30, 10:30 to 11:45 etc?

Having this doubt because, when I tried to fetch the appointments between 11:00 and 12:00, an appointment with start time as 12:00 and end time as 12:30 was retrieved. The same appointment is retrieved when tried to fetch the ones between 12:00 and 1:00. Noticed that this appointment was having a preBuffer of 5 minutes, which means it will ideally start from 11:55.

Also, preBuffer and postBuffer are present for both appointment and service. Isn't the buffer time of a service, applied to an appointment. Aren't they the same. Couldn't find any confirmation in documents.

Can someone please help with these? Thanks in advance.

Sneha Dominic
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  • Total appointment duration will remain as 60 minutes, it's just that the appointment will happen only if the pre and post buffer times are available. more on prebuffer and post buffer is here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/bookings/set-buffer-time?view=o365-worldwide – Jeevan_MSFT_Identity Dec 03 '20 at 10:20
  • Thanks for the details @Jeevan_MSFT_Identity. Was working on a solution to display the slot details for customers to book. So, while considering the slot, it'll include the buffer time, but when we notify customer, it should just be the slot duration. – Sneha Dominic Dec 04 '20 at 06:11
  • Good to hear that. I am moving this to the answer section. Please mark it as verfied if it helped. – Jeevan_MSFT_Identity Dec 04 '20 at 09:45

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Total appointment duration will remain as 60 minutes, it's just that the appointment will happen only if the pre and post buffer times are available. more on prebuffer and post buffer is here

Jeevan_MSFT_Identity
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