Easy Micrsoft Outlook Scheduling

Simplify Microsoft Outlook Scheduling

Microsoft Outlook is the industry leading email, scheduling and calendaring application for personal and corporate meeting scheduling.  Microsoft Outlook is used by small and large organizations alike for standard meetings, complex recurring meeting and delegate scheduling. 

While Microsoft Outlook is the most powerful email and calendaring tool on the planet, it does not provide options for easy conference room, resource, equipment or catering scheduling.  Though Outlook’s resource scheduling options are limited, it has a unique open architecture for third party tools like MeetingPlanner to provide seamless and easy scheduling solution integration.    

Let’s face it, meeting organizers are typically very busy and do not want to spend a lot of time organizing resources for a meeting.  Organizers will either forget to request services they need for a meeting like room set up/equipment delivery/support or they will wait until the last minute to make a request only to find they are not available.   

In addition, scheduled meetings change and get cancelled – a lot!  As scheduled meetings change or get cancelled, meeting organizers forget to change the reserved resources and don’t notify support such as facilities management, video conference or catering, causing double bookings or “phantom” reservations (scheduled room with no meeting!).

Meeting organizers want Microsoft Outlook, with enhanced scheduling, to be the single solution they use to schedule meetings, invite guests, book rooms and schedule other resources.   

 Minimum Scheduling Requirements:

• Easy scheduling in Microsoft Outlook with invited guests and standard Outlook settings
• Search engine to find available rooms and resources that match their meeting needs in Microsoft Outlook
• Room availability schedule views in Microsoft Outlook
• Automatic updates and cancellations based on Microsoft Outlook meeting changes
• Automatic conflict management – no double bookings!
• Microsoft Outlook delegate scheduling
• Recurring meeting scheduling and conflict management
• Reporting – standard and on-demand

 Additional Bonus Capabilities

• Video conference, tele conference and audio visual equipment scheduling in Microsoft Outlook
• Catering in Microsoft Outlook – internal and external menu items
• Visitor management in Microsoft Outlook
• Automated work flow and notification services for support teams
• Facility management booking for room set up and breakdown in Microsoft Outlook
• Digital signage integration - interactive and non-interactive
• Building systems – lighting and HVAC integration
• 3^rd party tool integration

One easy tool for scheduling integrated Microsoft Outlook provides the following benefits:

1. Improved meeting organizer (employee) efficiency
2. Improved support personnel productivity – video conference, AV, catering, facilities
3. Maximized space utilization
4. Reduced costs

To schedule a meeting and reserve resources such as a conference room, equipment or other services, a user will follow the traditional Outlook process to determine the meeting time, date and included attendees. Note that the Outlook appointment and MeetingPlanner are 100% synchronized and the meeting time and date information is automatically populated in MeetingPlanner!

MeetingPlanner will automatically default to the meeting organizers location, import the number of attendees and provide the user with additional room, equipment and other resource search criteria such as:

• Number of meeting attendees room capacity
• Meeting location
• Conference room attributes
• Equipment/Resource choices
• Room Set Up Options
• Conferencing
• Video conference services (Tandberg, Polycom)
• Audio conference services (LiveMeeting, Cisco MeetingPlace, MeetMe, more)
• Catering
• Visitor Listing