Outlook: Scheduling Assistant

How can a meeting organizer view the best scheduling time for all participants?

Meeting Organizers can utilize Microsoft's Scheduling Assistant to view the best time to schedule meetings.

Microsoft's Scheduling Assistant is a scheduling tool that allows meeting organizers to view the availability of multiple people invited to a meeting during the scheduling phase.

To use Microsoft's Scheduling Assistant:

1. Create a new meeting in your Microsoft Outlook calendar OR reply all by meeting in an existing email strand.
   1. To create a new meeting:
      1. Navigate to your Outlook Calendar.

2. Select New Meeting.

B. To reply all by meeting:

1. Open the desired email.
2. Select the Reply by Meeting icon.

NOTE Reply by meeting will add all outlook users included on the email strand as invitees as well as the strand of emails.

2. Configure the meeting details:
   1. Add all invitees in the To... field.
   2. Add a subject for the meeting
   3. Select a Location. For virtual meetings, see Outlook: Add Virtual Meeting Links.

3. Adjust the End time to reflect the desired length of the meeting. 
4. Reference the right side Room Finder window for suggested times.

The calendar is color coded by the best days to schedule the meeting with the categorizations of good, fair, and poor. Below the calendar are suggested times with the the number of conflicts considering the Outlook calendars of all the invitees.

• Good days have time slots where all invitees are available
• Fair days have time slots where 1-2 invitees have conflicts at best
• Poor days have time slots where 3+ invitees have conflicts

It is important to note that Scheduling Assistant is only as accurate as the Microsoft Outlook calendar of each invitee.

5. Select the best suited time slow on the desired day.
6. Select Send.

Want to know more information about using Scheduling Assistant in Outlook? Read Microsoft's articles to Use the Scheduling Assistant and Room Finder for meetings in Outlook.