Day 8 – Scheduling Assistant: Stop Playing Calendar Tag
09/24/2014
30 Days with Office 365 for Educators – Day 8
If you have been following along with this Office 365 blog series you should start to see a pattern emerge. In previous posts I have talked about using the Office Web App, People, and Calendar and they all rely upon Contacts in Office 365.
Having one organizational directory greatly helps with all kinds of communication tasks. Office 365 utilizes this contact information as a launching point for other services like email, calendaring, audio/video conferencing, and instant messaging to name a few.
I devoted one post to the “About Me” feature in Office 365 and mentioned that this is your online business card. It needs to be kept up-to-date as this information is the way other Office 365 users come to know you online.
You can easily search the Office 365 directory within each service to find matches within the directory. For example, I need to send an email to Bob Jones. Within the Office Web App I can simply begin typing his name while my cursor is in the To: field and search the directory. If there is more than one Bob Jones you can look at their “About Me” information to determine the correct recipient.
The same thing holds true for Calendars. If you begin typing a name in the “Attendees” field for a new event you can search the directory to find the individual(s) you want to schedule an appointment with. When you schedule the appointment or meeting the Attendees will receive a confirmation email if you so choose.
To fully experience the power of digital calendars it is important for other users in the organization to also go digital. If you often work with a group of individuals it really helps if you can get buy-in from others to use their digital calendar. If others do not use the digital calendar then you will not be able to rely upon their free and busy time and will have to resort to the time consuming old-fashioned calendar tag method.
If however, others you regularly correspond with do use a digital calendar there is a fantastic feature that will save you vast amounts of time when coordinating with others. This is true for both face-to-face (F2F) and online meetings.
Scheduling Assistant
The Scheduling Assistant is built into Office 365 is a time saver. When you setup an appointment or a meeting and invite others using your calendar you will see an option called Scheduling Assistant.
It may not seem like much but simply being able to see the busy times on a co-worker(s) schedule is a huge time saver. Below you can see a meeting I am in process of setting up with another individual. On the left you see my calendar and on the right you see the calendar of the individual I am wanting to schedule an appointment with.
You can clearly see that we do indeed have some common time to meet when we are both free. I simply pick an open time and Save the appointment information and an email is sent to the other individual. The other person can either Accept or Decline the invitation.
Keep on Learning,
Tom Grissom, Ph.D.
@tomgrissom
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