Easier Ways to Create and Manage Meetings
Earlier posts about Meeting Requests with a Preview of your Calendar and Introducing Quick Steps might have left you wondering what other improvements Outlook 2010 brings to creating and managing meetings. There are many, and I am glad to give you an overview. Here’s how they can work for you.
Meeting Reply
If an e-mail conversation gets to a point where a meeting would be more useful, just click Meeting Reply to set up a meeting with the people involved in the conversation. It will copy the content of the e-mail conversation into the meeting request, to help keep you within the context of what has already been discussed, and add the recipients to the invitation. All you need to do is choose the time and location.
Meeting Suggestions
The new
Meeting Suggestions pane
helps you choose a location for the meeting and find a time that works for a majority of people. It suggests the best times to meet on a given day according to the availability of the meeting attendees. And, if you are using Exchange 2010, you can select a building and check available rooms there!
Meetings without a response
Looking at your calendar, you may have found it difficult to differentiate between new meetings that were automatically added to your calendar and meetings you tentatively accepted. It's now easy to tell the difference: meetings that you haven’t yet responded to are dimmed and have a dashed border.
Search for appointments
You can also search for all meetings that you haven’t yet responded to. The new
Requests Not Responded To button in the
Search Contextual Tab makes that a simple one-click action. It also allows searching for
accepted and for
tentatively accepted appointments.
Contextual Tab for Calendar
While you look at your calendar you may want to respond to some appointments, propose new times, change your free/busy status, or make other changes. Now you can do that without even opening a meeting. When you click on a meeting, a contextual tab appears and presents commands that are specific to a single instance or a recurring meeting.
Next 7 Days
In addition to the standard 5- and 7-day week views, there’s a new view that shows the next 7 days starting from today.
Schedule View
The new Schedule View shows multiple calendars horizontally -- a very effective way to help teams organize meetings. The Navigation Pane now includes your team and your manager’s team by default, so you can look at everyone’s calendars with just one click. You can also add your own groups by clicking Open Calendar and then the Calendar Groups button.
Copy
Now Outlook 2010 allows you to respond to a meeting right away when you copy it from another calendar, making sure that you will be included in future updates, and the organizer is informed that you are attending.
Copy Tracking Status
Do you organize big meetings with lots of attendees and you need to keep track of who is coming and who isn’t? Maybe you need to reserve a conference room with a table that can accommodate the number of people who have accepted. You can now copy the response tracking status to the clipboard and paste it somewhere else, like Excel! From there you can sort and organize the data just like any other table.
I hope you find these new ways of creating and handling meetings convenient and time-saving!
Rainer Schiller
Outlook Program Manager
