Finding out the best time for the meeting with your office colleagues is often not an easy job. You have to first ask them about their convenient time and then match the same with your schedule to arrive at the best suited time for all. The job of deciding when to meet is relatively simple if there are lesser people as attendees, however, how about if the meeting requires more people. The job just gets really tough with some not available or people dropping off due to varied reasons. All this process makes you invest lots of your productive time, isn’t it!
FindTime is an application that can help you schedule meetings faster. An add-in for Microsoft Outlook, FindTime helps you to decide on a meeting time easily with a systematic approach and that too without much of your involvement. The app automatically suggests to you what days and times work best for people required to attend the meeting. Hence, helping you to arrive at the consensus time pretty easily. Read below to find how to schedule meetings faster.
How to use Microsoft FindTime on Outlook
FindTime cuts down on organizing time. As an Organizer, you propose your selected times to all attendees and allow everyone to vote. Once there is a consensus done through voting, FindTime sends out the meeting invite on your behalf, and thus eliminates the time that you usually have to invest in coordinating with people and arriving at the best time for all.
To start using FindTime
The first step is to install FindTime and to do that, you are compulsorily required to login into Office 365 accounts. Once you are logged in, you can install FindTime from the Office store. Once installed, restart Outlook and you can see the FindTime icon located at the top right corner of the Outlook screen. Note the difference in appearance on Outlook and Outlook on the Web shown below.
On Outlook app
On Outlook on the web
So having set up the App, now you can compose a new email or reply to an existing email for scheduling a meeting.
For instance, if you want to set up a meeting with the people listed by replying to an existing email. Click on”Reply with Meeting Poll”.
A panel opens through which you can set the meeting duration time. The middle and lower portion of the panel allows you to see the schedule of the people whom you wish to invite for a meeting. Here you can select multiple time slots and send them to people involved asking them to vote.
People’s status is represented by different colors and based on the same you can decide which meeting slot is best suited for all.
Click on “Next” and you see the shortlisted time slots and tabs like “meeting location”. You are now ready to make an invite. Click “Insert to email” to make an invite.
Having made an invite, click “send” on your message inbox window to allow people to start voting on the time slots you have selected. Everyone invited can see the online poll about who is voting for which time. You can even know others know about your favorite slot.
As soon as the votes are in, the invite gets scheduled and your meeting has been set up. The Organizer also gets an email about the invite confirmation.
Note: On the recipients’ side, they just need an email address to receive your invite and internet access to vote at the FindTime website. Also, they can vote from any device they wish from. Recipients do not need to have FindTime installed on their PC or handphone, or for the matter an Office 365 account.
Visit findtime.microsoft.com to start using FindTime and let us know if you like this new app from Microsoft.
