Have you ever spent more time deciding when the best date and time to meet are than actually meeting? FindTime is an Office365 app for Outlook that offers intelligent suggestions on what days and times work the best for people within your organization to meet. Once you and your team reach consensus, FindTime sends out the meeting invite on your behalf, eliminating the time-consuming back-and-forth usually required to find the best meeting time.
Currently, FindTime can only be installed on a Microsoft 365 Apps for business or enterprise account that includes Exchange Online.
To get started you will have to install FindTime. In Outlook navigate to the Home ribbon tab and select Get Add-ins. Search for the FindTime add-in and select Add. You will now see the FindTime grouping with the Reply with Meeting Poll tool on the ribbon.
To schedule a meeting in Outlook with FindTime, just follow these steps:
- Create a new email or select an email to reply to.
- Add people required for the meeting in the To field (and optional participants in the Cc field).
- In the Home ribbon tab select Reply with Meeting Poll (FindTime).
- A task pane appears in the Outlook window to walk you through the scheduling process.
- Select the meeting settings including Duration, Time Zone preference, Work Hours (check to limit suggested meeting times to workdays and hours only), and Dates.
- FindTime looks through the invitees' schedules (if available) and suggests suitable meeting times.
- The people icons show color-coded availability status (such as green for available or red for busy).
- Select a few suitable meeting dates and times for invitees to choose from (polls that have 20 suggestions or fewer are more likely to reach consensus).
- Enter the meeting location. Online meetings are enabled by default (FindTime will schedule a Skype for Business or Microsoft Teams meeting).
- Select Add to email. FindTime inserts the poll table into your email.
- Select Send to send the meeting invites and start the voting process.
- You'll receive responses as your recipients begin voting!
If you want to view and track your polls, all your polls are centrally located on your FindTime Dashboard at Outlook.Office.com/FindTime/Dashboard. From there you can edit, cancel, or delete your polls.
Here’s a sneak preview of FindTime in action:
