Scheduling Meetings in Outlook

There's an easier way to schedule a meeting besides sending multiple email messages to everyone and waiting (hoping) for a response. If all participants are using Outlook and the Outlook Calendar, you can:

1. Click Calendar.
2. On the Actions menu, click Plan a Meeting.
3. Click Add Others, and then click Add from Address Book.
4. Type the desired name(s) in the Search name field or scroll through the list of names and double-click to add to the Required list of attendees.
5. For each name entered, by default their attendance is Required, but you can change to Optional (The Required and Optional attendees appear in the To box of the meeting request).
6. Click a time when all invitees are available. You can use AutoPick Next to find the next available free time for all invitees. If you don't like the first AutoPick time, click AutoPick Next again, and again.
7. Click Make Meeting to actually schedule the meeting.
8. In the Subject box, type a description.
9. If you did not schedule a room, enter the location in the Location box.*
10. If you want to make the meeting recurring, click Recurrence, and then select the recurrence pattern.
11. Select any other options you want.
12. Click Send.

Each invited guest will then receive a meeting request in their email and can accept the invitation, tentatively accept, decline, or suggest a new meeting date and/or time.

*You can also attach the agenda for the meeting either as a separate file or in the text window at the bottom of the Meeting dialog box.

So why are you not using the Meeting Request feature of Outlook?

Save the Trees, Use eDocuments

You know there's no such thing as a paperless meeting, but you can at least avoid printing 15 copies of a handout and then having only 8 people show up. Simply attach any documents (handouts, agenda, etc) to your Meeting Request using Outlook. Then if the participants plan to attend, invite them to bring their own copy. An even better solution is to use a SharePoint site, in which case you can place the document on the SharePoint site in the Shared Documents area and provide all attendees with a URL to the document. The latter method avoids creating digital duplicate copies of the same document (one attached to each message you send) which adds to the workload of the mail server.