FindTime is an Outlook add-in for Office 365 that makes organising meetings ridiculously simple. You select your attendees and the length of the meeting, and FindTime automatically searches your attendees' Outlook calendars and suggests suitable times when you are all available. You select a few of these potential times/dates, and a poll is emailed to your attendees so that they can vote on their preferred time. Once a consensus has been reached, a calendar event is automatically created in everyone's calendar. It's as simple as that.
Here's a walk through of how it works:
1) Once you have downloaded the FindTime add-in, you can start a FindTime poll from either an appointment or an email. Simply "To" your essential attendees and "Cc" your optional ones, then click on "New Meeting Poll" in the toolbar.
(Image removed)2) In the FindTime panel on the right, you can select the duration of your meeting (and the date if you have a specific one in mind) and FindTime will automatically calculate the next time when all your attendees will be available at the same time and for that length of time.
Your invitees' availability is helpfully demonstrated by colour coded stick figures:
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You can then view the options by either time, which shows you all times even when all attendees are not available, or by availability, which only shows you options from the first time that is suitable for everybody.
3) You can then select as many of the possible times as you would like to include in your poll, enter the location, insert the poll into your email, and send:
(Image removed) (Image removed)4) Your invitees will receive an email asking them to vote, and will be sent to the FindTime website where they can see an overview of how everyone else has voted, and select their preferred time(s):
(Image removed)5) Once a consensus on the time has been reached, an automatic meeting invite will be sent to all attendees and added to their Outlook calendars:
(Image removed)It's as easy as that, and is a total lifesaver for busy people and calendar organisers alike!
Even better news is that your recipients don't need to have FindTime to be able to use it, they only need to have an email address and an internet connection.
You can send a meeting invite to anyone - even if they don't have Office 365 - so long as the organiser is using Office 365. Recipients can receive invites on any email provider, and can access the FindTime voting website on any device, which means that you can arrange meetings both internally and across other companies with equal ease.
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