Using MS Outlook's scheduling assistant to properly send meeting invites

Hello Heroes!

Let’s say that we want to send an invitation for a meeting. We would click on new items, meeting (or use the Reply With Meeting button over the email) and then we would select the people that we want to send the invitation to.

After we’ve filled the title and the required people, we determine if we want them to be either required or optional, and we select a tentative start time and end time to the meeting.

How do we make sure that the people that we want to attend the meeting will have the time to participate?

The proper way to schedule a meeting using outlook is to use the scheduling assistant feature.

After imputing the title, the required or optional people and a start and end date, we click on scheduling assistant and it will open up a view where we will have all the attendees. We can mark them here as required or optional and if they are members of our organization, we will be able to see what are the time slots that they have in their calendars as free or busy. In this view you can also add resources, which can be devices (projectors, displays) or rooms.

Then we can proceed to select the timeslot in which all the attendees have free time. If because of the number of attendees this gets complex, we can use the option to auto pick by selecting either:

• Required people (Will look for time available only for people marked as required)

• Required people and one resource (Will look for time available only for people marked as required and the first available resource)

• All people and one resource (Will look for time available for everyone, either marked as required or optional plus the first available resource)

• All people and resources (Will look for time available for everyone, either marked as required or optional plus the time available for all resources)

After you have chosen your option, auto pick will immediately go to the next available time slot that meets your requirements. Be aware that this relies on the information that is input on the calendar in outlook by all of the members of your organization, thus to make sure that scheduling works, all the members of your organization need to use their outlook calendar to keep track of their free time.

Got any tips on the Scheduling Assistant? Please comment below 😊

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