MICROSOFT 365: Managing Your Calendar
Calendaring Tips for New OUTLOOK Users
Your calendar items were migrated from Google BUT you may have to ask coworkers to share their calendars with you if you need to see details. NOTE: You will be able to see Free/Busy time for all Team Members and you will be able to use the Scheduling Assistant to find ideal meeting times.
To add coworkers calendars to the left sidebar of Outlook calendar, click on “Add calendar” in the left-hand side of the Outlook calendar, click “Add from directory”, under “Please select an account to search from” select your email address, start typing the name of the person’s calendar and choose which place you would like it to appear in your sidebar (My calendars, Other calendars, People’s calendars), click “Add.”
You may not see all of the email/calendar distribution groups to which you have become accustomed. These groups will be migrated over but there is no set date for this to be completed.
Calendaring Tips for Everyone
- In Settings, identify your working hours and locations. Click the Settings Gear, choose Work Hours and Location. Why? Scheduling assistant will take this into consideration AND anyone scheduling without the assistant will see a note when choosing times outside of your working hours.
- Take time to mark meetings accurately as free/busy so that the scheduling assistant can work as intended.
- In the meeting, drop down the arrow next to the Busy icon on the top menu, choose Free, Working Elsewhere, Busy, Tentative, Away.
- To mark a meeting private to even those with whom you have shared your calendar: in the meeting, click Private (if you don’t see the option, click the ellipses (three dots) and choose Private.
- Consider using Tasks for reminders. (click the My Day icon at the top of your screen, it looks like a calendar with a checkmark) and add a task.
- Add PTO to your Calendar as away time.
- Create a meeting request in response to an email by
- WEB: clicking the ellipsis (three dots) and choose Meeting, under Respond.
- CLIENT: drag and drop the email message onto the Calendar icon in the Navigation Pane.
- End meetings early automatically to avoid back to back meetings with no preparation time: Click the Settings Gear, choose Calendar, Events and Invitations, Check the box next to Shorten duration for all events.
- View Multiple Calendars at once. Overlay the calendars or Choose Split View: Add click the check box next to added calendars in the left Navigation Pane for overlay, Click Split View to see all selected calendars in a separate window.
- Use the Scheduling Assistant. Create a meeting, add the attendees and use the suggested meeting times when all recipients are available. Alternately, use the Scheduling Poll Feature from within the meeting to ask others to vote for their preferred times and have the meeting automatically scheduled when everyone responds.
What is TEAMS?
- TEAMS is a chat-based workspace for:
- Real-time Collaboration and Communication
- Meetings
- File and App sharing
- TEAMS is fully integrated with your Outlook Calendar so meetings created in TEAMS will always be available in our Outlook Calendar.
Update a Migrated Google Event with TEAMS Joining Information
TEAMS is the preferred virtual meeting platform going forward. Ideally, you will begin having your regular meetings using TEAMS vs. Google Meet. We do realize that some of our Team Members regularly use Zoom and that add-on is approved and available if you had a license prior to migration.
A challenge you may encounter is that your migrated meetings still have Google Meet joining information. We’d like you to take the time to update the joining information to TEAMS.
If you have meetings on your Outlook Calendar set up previously with Google Meet you have a couple of options to update the meeting with TEAMS joining information.
EASY: Open your migrated meeting and remove the Google Meet information. Click the “This is a TEAMS meeting” button and TEAMS joining information will be included. You may want to let attendees know that TEAMS information has been added.
OR:
Delete the meeting and recreate it.
- Make note of the day/date/time info and attendees.
- Delete the meeting and notify everyone that you are recreating the meeting to include TEAMS joining info. Use DELETE ALL ITEMS or delete “All events in series,” we’ve seen some issues with deleting “This and all following events.”
- You can create the meeting in OUTLOOK Calendar or you can create the meeting in TEAMS.
- NOTE: Create the meeting in TEAMS if you have a regularly scheduled meeting that will require collaboration/sharing and storage of files.
- Create the meeting in OUTLOOK Calendar
- Click New Event
- Invite required attendees and optional attendees
- Note – as soon as you add an attendee TEAMS joining info will be added for virtual attendees
- Choose Date and Time
- Note – you can use scheduling assistant to see free/busy time for attendees
- Add description and any needed files (agenda, background, etc.)
- Click Send
Create the meeting in TEAMS
- Click Calendar in TEAMS or choose the correct TEAM
- If you click Calendar in TEAMS just follow the instructions above for creating a new event.
- If you select a TEAM click the arrow on the video icon next to the three dots at the top of your workspace
- Choose Schedule a Meeting and follow the instructions above for creating a new event
- If you have created a meeting series in TEAMS and want to edit an occurrence of the meeting (versus editing the whole series), you will need to go into the TEAMS calendar, click on the meeting occurrence you want to edit and choose “Edit occurrence”
- To customize Meeting Options in an Outlook Calendar or Teams meeting, click on the meeting invite and select “Edit”, scroll to the bottom and click on “Meeting options” (if the hyperlink doesn’t work, right click and choose open link). Meeting options will open and you can add co-organizers, choose who can bypass the lobby, set up recording and Copilot transcription, etc.
