How many meetings do you have in a week? Too many and you want to save time for yourself? Too few meetings and you want to automate the process and increase the number of meetings? Do you need to schedule meetings between multiple people with busy calendars and finding the right time to meet takes forever? Do you need to easily cancel, reschedule or add/remove participants?
We’ve updated FreeBusy Outlook Add-in so you can schedule any type of meeting in just a few clicks, like buying Christmas presents from Amazon Prime.🎁
Read on for all the details! 👇
In this guide, we'll cover how to:
1. Share your availability and let participants suggest best meeting times
2. Propose multiple meeting times and let external participants vote on a common time to meet
3. Schedule meetings on behalf of someone else directly from the Add-in
4. Share your team availability for round robin & collective meetings
5. Include email contents in the meeting notes
1. Share your availability and let participants suggest best meeting times
How it works? If you don’t have a deadline for a specific meeting, if you have a high volume of meetings per day or, au contraire, if you want to increase the number of meetings in a day, you can automate the process and share your open availability link. Participants will access your availability and choose the date & time that works best for them. The link inserted in your email includes all the needed information and participants don’t have to enter any other details. Yes, we include in a smart tiny link, all the meeting details, inducing participants names, title & agenda, preselected meeting duration and meeting location options etc.
See a short demo video to understand exactly what you need to do. This is for when you have multiple meeting participants, but works the same for one on one meetings, except that the meeting is automatically scheduled when the participant selects the first convenient time (so, no polling for one on one meetings - it's simpler).
What participants see & do? In this case, participants will select themselves from the list (if you have multiple participants), see your availability page, propose meeting times, vote on the best time to meet and when a consensus is reached, the meeting is automatically scheduled and added on everyone’s calendar. All you need to do is set smart reminders to eliminate no-shows. No one likes no-shows. See what they see, in this demo video👇👇👇
2. Propose multiple meeting times and let external participants vote on a common time to meet
How it works? If you want to have more control over when the meeting will take place - for example, in the next days - you can insert multiple meeting times and let participants vote on a common time to meet. If proposed meeting times do not work, participants can always propose other meeting times. This is an elegant way of suggesting that you want the meeting to take place in the selected time options.
See a short demo video to understand exactly what you need to do. This is for when you have multiple meeting participants, but works the same for one on one meetings, except that the meeting is automatically scheduled when the participant selects the first convenient time (so, no polling for one on one meetings - it's simpler).
What participants see & do? In this case, participants will select themselves from the list (if you have multiple participants), and vote yes or no on preferred meeting times. No extra information is needed and they don't have to vote on all suggested times. They can also come back and revise their votes (if the poll is open). When a consensus is reached, the meeting is automatically scheduled and added on everyone’s calendar.
3. Schedule meetings on behalf of someone else directly from the Add-in
If you are an executive assistant, FreeBusy Add-in makes it easy to find a meeting time that works for both people you are assisting and those they meet with.
How it works? Select the option “Schedule on behalf of someone else” and you'll see people whose calendars you can manage. The rest of the flow is the same as the meetings above.
4. Share your team availability for round robin & collective meetings
When you insert an availability link, you can browse in your collection of event templates and choose one of your event templates. You can create an event template for your team, based on project, client, seniority level etc.
First, create a team event template for round robin meetings.
Second, share your team availability for round robin meetings using Outlook Add-in (see how to share your availability link, above).
5. Include email contents in the meeting notes
When you want to add reminders for what the meeting is about, select the option include email contents in the meeting notes, and your email will be included in the meeting invitation.
We make it easy to schedule meetings so you can focus on the important things - connecting with people, sharing ideas and building trust.
If you didn't installed Outlook Add-in, you can easily do this by following the link below.
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