Exchange Hosting - Calendaring Features

Booking meetings with colleagues can be an absolute nightmare. Trawling through your calendar to find a free spot, asking others to do the same, dozens of emails back and forth and then finally discovering that the meeting room/projector/television isn't available.

With Microsoft Exchange Hosting this can all be done automatically using its intuitive calendaring features.

Sharing and sending calendars

Rather than ask each person required to attend the meeting to check through their calendars individually and respond with free times, the Exchange calendar allows you to either share calendars or send snapshots.

• Sharing calendars

By sharing calendars with each other, you can each see when the others are free and mutually agree on a time.

• Sending calendars

If each meeting attendee sends a snapshot of their calendar to one person, that person can overlay these snapshots to quickly find a timeslot where everyone is free.

By taking advantage of these features, you can remove the endless back and forth that typically characterises meeting organisation.

Calendar Attendant

Once you've agreed on a time, the meeting can be set in the calendar and all attendees invited. The invitation will automatically be accepted as long as there is a free space in the calendar. Any changes made to the meeting will be changed on every attendee's calendar, so there will never be any out of date information on anyone's calendar.

Alternatively, you can bypass the sharing and sending step, and simply take the automatic route to discover who is and isn't free for a particular meeting.

Sheduling Assistant

The automatic scheduling assistant allows you to see what people have in their calendars without the need for them to give you permissions to view it. If you haven’t got permissions to view that persons calendar all you will see is Free/Busy time without any detailed information. If the person is busy you will see blue blocked out times and if the person is free there will be nothing. In addition to showing free/busy time the scheduling assistant will recommend the best time to schedule the meeting based on invitees and resource availability.

Resource Booking

With the meeting booked, you need to book the meeting room and any other resources you might need. With Microsoft Exchange Hosting's resource booking feature this can all be handled automatically.

If a resource is free for a given time, the booking will be accepted by the hosted Exchange server, rather than having to be monitored manually. Policies can be set up at administration level to set priorities (i.e. who can book certain resources and who can't, or who takes precedent if there's a clash) and for how long a resource can be booked.

As long as the request is within policy, it will be accepted. If not, the administrator will be notified so they can manually review the request.

Taken together, these features can make organising a meeting entirely automated, taking away all of the frustration and wasted time that traditionally goes with getting busy workers together in the same room.

Calendaring features are just one of the many benefits of using Microsoft’s Exchange Hosting – call us now to learn more.