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Meeting Requests with a Preview of your Calendar

Earlier we’ve shown how Conversations and Quick Steps are designed to help you get through your email faster than ever before. Now, we’d like to show you another feature that will save you time whenever you receive a meeting request!

Handling meeting requests usually involves two important steps – reading the meeting request and checking your calendar to see if you’re available. To save you time, Outlook 2010 simplifies that process and combines those steps into a single experience with the Calendar Preview.

The Calendar Preview shows a slice of your calendar in the meeting request allowing you to read the request and check that date on your calendar at the same time:

screenshot of calendar preview in reading pane

Now that you can see your calendar and the meeting request at the same time, you have the convenience of checking your schedule for that day and immediately make an informed decision about whether you can attend the meeting, all without leaving your inbox.

The Calendar Preview also works great with recurring meetings. When you receive a request for a recurring meeting, the Calendar Preview enables you to view each instance of the recurring meeting or just those with conflicting appointments:

screenshot of meeting series calendar preview in reading pane with labels for the buttons

With the Calendar Preview, you can confidently handle any meeting request without leaving your inbox because you’ll always know exactly how that meeting affects your schedule.

Cool Trick: If you have a conflicting meeting, double click the Calendar Preview and your calendar will open to that day, allowing you to update your schedule as you see fit.

This is one of my favorite features in Outlook 2010, and I hope you like it too. Please let us know what you think in the comments!

Tom O’Neill
Outlook Program Manager

Posted: Thursday, August 20, 2009 3:43 PM by outblog

Comments

Jim Noellsch said:

This is an absolutely terrific addition to Outlook 2010.  I would sorely miss this feature if I was forced to revert back to Outlook 2007.

# August 20, 2009 3:53 PM

Tim said:

that is awesome - great improvement over the existing dual step process. Though to be honest you can right click calendar and show it in a new window now.

Question - what support for windows mobile 6 (7?) and outlook and calendar etc will 2010 have - will this sort of thing be able to be done on the mobile platform as well? as a mobile outlook user this is kind of important.

# August 23, 2009 11:42 PM

Tim said:

that is awesome - great improvement over the existing dual step process. Though to be honest you can right click calendar and show it in a new window now.

Question - what support for windows mobile 6 (7?) and outlook and calendar etc will 2010 have - will this sort of thing be able to be done on the mobile platform as well? as a mobile outlook user this is kind of important.

# August 23, 2009 11:42 PM

Leta said:

Would this be available if you manage someone else's calendar? Features like this would be awesome for EA's if they would allow viewing of their manager's calendar. Otherwise it would be useless for them. EA's spend most of their day in Outlook calendar/email - hopefully you'll keep them in mind given they are likely the heaviest user of this product.

# August 26, 2009 10:09 PM

outblog said:

Tim - I cannot comment on what the Windows Mobile team is planning to do, but you should definitely submit a feature request to them!

Leta – Yes, this feature is designed to work for delegate scenarios (e.g. Executive Assistants) as well.

Glad you like the feature!

Tom O’Neill

Outlook Program Manager

# August 27, 2009 5:41 PM

Simon Devlin said:

I like the way this is shaping up, but there's still a major usability point that I'm hoping will be addressed.  It's related to meeting requests so I'm not going off on a wild tangent.

If you're trying to create an appointment - let's say it's a conference call and there are 10 attendees from different countries spread across several time zones.  There's no way, as far as I can tell, to see more that one time zone on the Scheduling view - it defaults to the timezone of the organizer and there's no facility to add extra time lines to assist in scheduling appointments in different time zones.

Right now I resort to using a website with a cross timezone meeting planner on it!

Here are a few suggestions;

The day view lets you add a 2nd time zone to view - at the minimum honour those settings in the schedule view;

Allow N different time zones to be displayed along the top - I've got plenty of screen space!

Extend the 'out of office hours' highlighting to be relative to yours if the recipient is in a different time zone (GMT in one style, EST in another, PDT in a third for example)

Not sure how else to get this suggestion in if I'm not on the TAP.

Thanks

# October 4, 2009 7:07 PM

Pas Argenio said:

If there was an adequate User Manual, we wouldn't need all these "tips" from "experts"

# October 27, 2009 10:52 AM

Michael said:

In regards to Outlook 2010, will there be an 'email follow-up' feature? Meaning, if I send someone an email and receive no reply to that email with a specified amount of time, that I will get an alert?

# November 10, 2009 8:18 AM
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