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Hello, it's Matt and welcome to Collaboration Coach.
This time we're going to have a look at "Find Time" for Outlook.
Find Time is an Outlook add-on for Microsoft that helps you schedule meetings with a meeting poll.
We've all been in that situation where you want to set up a meeting
but you can't see the calendars of the other attendees
or you just want to let the attendees choose when to meet.
With Find Time you can offer the attendees a range of times when you're free and let them choose.
Find Time is an Outlook add-in so first of all I'm going to show you how to add it to Outlook.
Now this process is the same if you're using Outlook for Mac or Windows.
You basically need to find this button here which is the add-ins button.
When you press it, it opens a new window and shows you all the available add-ins.
You can also switch to "my add-ins" which shows you the ones you've already got installed.
To install Find Time just go to the search box and type "find time".
You'll see Find Time pop up here.
You just need to press "add", and then "continue",
and then you can "get started" which will take you to a splash page that you can scroll down
and it gives you a good overview of what it can do.
Just close that down and then go to the meetings or calendar section of Outlook.
Now when you do a new appointment you'll see a "new meeting poll" button here.
I'm going to call my meeting "project meeting" and I'm going to add some attendees.
Two of them are in my organisation and one is outside.
Now you can see what's happening over here in the Find Time pane.
First thing it's asked me to do is set the duration of the meeting.
You can see I've got 30 minutes so you can switch that to 45
You can lock it into the working hours only and you can change the time zone if you want to.
If I scroll down here a bit you can see I can pick a date
and what it's done here is filtered my availability in a list
alongside the availability of all my guests.
On Friday the 13th I've got two slots where three of the possible attendees are available
and one is unknown - so that's Bob.
Because he's outside of my organisation Find Time can't see his calendar so doesn't know if he's available or not.
And you can see these two times - three of us are available
and if I scroll down here you can start to see some people aren't available,
so I can just choose the times that I think are most convenient for everybody.
This one at three and this one at half-past three
and you can also see that I can go here to the availability group,
understand who was available and who wasn't
and I can also see the actual calendar - so what the suggested time is and what the events around it are.
So I've chosen two options here and then I hit "next".
It gives me some poll settings up here so it can notify me about poll updates
so when people vote it will send me an email just to tell me.
You can also schedule the meeting when the attendees reach a consensus.
You can also ask it to hold the times on the calendar
so these two times - it will put a blocker in my calendar and I'll show you that in a minute.
Then you can also lock the poll and require attendees to verify their identity.
When I'm happy with the settings I just hit "add to email"
and that creates me an email that I can now send to my attendees.
It's got this section here which is what Find Time adds.
So all I have to do is hit "send".
Now I've switched to what the attendee will see.
So one of my participants, Megan, has received this email from me with the little Find Time section in it
and she just needs to press the "select options" button which opens up a Find Time window for her
and she'll see my two times.
Now you can see the details of the meeting and she can also set the time zone as well.
So I'll just set that to London.
You can see the two times there - three o'clock and 3:30.
If three o'clock is her preferred time - she doesn't want to do the 3:30,
she can just choose those two and then she just hits "vote".
Now I'm back looking at the calendar of the organiser of the meeting.
In Friday the 13th here, I've got holds for 3 and 3:30.
If you can remember we asked Find Time to hold the times so I don't book anything in there
Now as the participants vote on my meeting,
I will start to receive emails telling me what they decided.
This is from Alex, one of my participants
and if I scroll down you can see I've got three votes so far
and I had four attendees, so Bob hasn't voted but Alex and Megan have.
I don't have to wait 'til all the votes have come in,
I can hit the "schedule" button and it will take me to the Find Time page again
and I can schedule the meeting.
So I'm gonna go for three o'clock, hit the "new meeting" button here,
and then I just need to send the meeting.
Now what that would do is send a normal Outlook meeting invite to schedule the meeting in everybody's calendar
and it will take the holds out of my calendar
so if I switch to Outlook now and go to the calendar,
you can see it's put that meeting in there at three,
and it's also removed the holds that were there previously.
So that's how you use Find Time to schedule meetings the easy way.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time
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