We have all been on an email chain where someone is trying to organize a phone call or a meeting with numerous people, people that are outside of your company. “What times out of the following list works best for everyone?” This turns into a half dozen or so back and forth emails of everyone providing their availability. There has to be an easier way!
There is, and it is free!
Microsoft has a lot of features included with Office 365, they also have a lot of add on programs that are not included necessarily as part of Office 365. One of these is Microsoft FindTime.
How it works
After a quick and easy install (https://findtime.microsoft.com), you will have a new option inside of any new email you compose.
Selecting the New Meeting Poll option will bring up a pane on the right-hand side of your email with some options.
You can select the duration of the meeting and if it is during ‘work hours’. This will then automatically find open times in your calendar to choose from. You simply select some times and dates that work for you.
You have options to enter a location and even make it a Microsoft Teams meeting.
Once complete you select the add to email option and that’s where all the magic begins.
Microsoft FindTime will mark all your meeting time options as tentative in your calendar and send these out as options for your attendees to vote on. After everyone has chosen what works best for them, Microsoft FindTime selects the winner and sends out a meeting invite automatically to the attendees, including removing the losers from your calendar and creating the same calendar invite in your calendar.
It could not be any easier, and it is free.
If you are not using this now, do your self a favor, download it and install it on your device. Setup a sample meeting poll and send out to one our your collogues or your personal email address to become familiar with how it works before you need to use it.
If you have questions on how to use Microsoft FindTime or any of the other Microsoft Office 365 products, please don’t hesitate to reach out to someone at The Miller Group.
Happy meeting!
As our Chief Strategy Officer, Chris Roberts is committed to helping each and every one of our clients attain a higher standard of IT efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and optimization. He focuses on research and development in an effort to identify and harness the best IT practices for businesses.
