Rules to Better Calendars - 25 Rules

If you wish to organize a meeting that involves some of your colleagues and a client, instead of sending an email, send an appointment. Sending appointments is convenient because all the user has to do is click 'Accept' and it is in their calendar.

This way Outlook will remind your colleagues about the appointment and you can update them if any changes are made.

If the appointment is for 3 days or less, send a separate appointment for each day. This is because multiple-day appointments appear at the top in your Outlook Calendar, so you risk missing the appointment (see below).

A lot of people talk about appointments and plan to do it later. E.g. you’re at the dentist and they give you a card with your next visit’s time written on it. People take the card and plan to enter it into their calendar later.

A better way is to stop, pull out your phone, and enter it immediately before leaving the dentist.

Similarly, you might be on the phone with a client and arrange a date and plan to enter it in later. A better way is to say “Hang on a second while I shoot you an appointment for the time.”

Locking in time as soon as possible is a big efficiency gain, and helps to avoid any possible mistakes or double bookings.

One of the least successful ways to get an appointment is to ask for one. The reason is that by asking for a meeting, you're creating hurdles. A hurdle for you to look at your calendar for available times, a hurdle for them to look at their calendar, a hurdle to reply to the email. And then there is the obstacle that arises when their proposed time conflicts with something you're doing, and the process begins again. Even for people who don't have busy calendars, these meetings often don't happen because they slip down the inbox.

The better way to get an appointment with someone is to throw an appointment their way. You have a higher chance of it sticking if it appears in their calendar. You will be amazed at your success rate. That said, make sure you soften the appointment with something like “if there is a better time for you, let me know”.

It is a good idea to send the appointment a few weeks out, it is less confronting and less demanding than finding a meeting in your calendar for the next day (or the same week).

The obvious caveat is that you shouldn't send meeting requests to people who have no idea who you are, that's just spam in a different vehicle.

Make sure appointments have address details unless it's obvious for all attendees.

It's important to always add the address information in appointments when a third party is included. Example:

• A client meeting at your location
• A meeting at the client location

The exception is for internal meeting appointments.

In internal, you should invite a co-worker to work with you in the specific room and not include the address. Example:

• SSW Boardroom Sydney
• SSW Boardroom Brisbane
• SSW Chapel Sydney

When sending an appointment, it's a good idea to choose your subject/title intelligently so that people can see all the information they need to see on the Subject of the Appointment.

For example, if the appointment is a meeting request you should include the names of the persons attending that appointment.

For hotel bookings, include the Hotel name in the Appointment Subject and address in the location.

For flight bookings, include the Name and flight number (⚠️as a minimum), plus the booking number and departure time in the subject. i.e. Flight: John H - QF1234 – REF#102065 – 7:30pm. Its also wise to include the exact location in the appointment, specifically the Terminal number.

This will help make it as clear as possible, and you can see the relevant information without even opening the appointment.If all else fails, attaching the airline booking confirmation PDF to the appointment is a great failsafe.

When booking flights, to ensure nothing is missed, read through this rule: do-you-know-how-to-create-an-appointment-in-the-outlook-calendar-for-flights/

Include the rule (Link) on the appointment. This will ensure you have quick access when double checking you have all the relevant info.

CRM users making bookings should keep their naming standards consistent.

Related rules

• Do you realize the importance of a good email Subject?
• Scheduling - Do you have a consistent naming convention for your bookings?

Every change to an appointment is a hassle, and it's good to be explicit as to why the appointment had to change, so always give a reason.

Unlike an email, changing an appointment will not have the original content recorded, it is a good idea to make it visible by adding the version number to the history. This shows the timeline of the changes and how many changes they've asked for! When we have v7, people will start questioning how this has happened.

Whenever you have to modify the time, attendees, or subject of an appointment, always send the updated appointment with comments at the top to explain why you want to make these changes.

You should add to altered appointments to track this:

1. Your name - If the appointment is coming from a shared mailbox or Team, it can hide who actually made the change - so it is good practice to put your name next to your alteration comment
2. As per our conversation - If you are changing the appointment based on a conversation with someone, put this in the note so other people know who was involved in changing the appointment

3. Version number - Adding the v# to the notes can help people to track of all of the changes.

   E.g. "(Calum: V2 - As per my conversation with Bob, changing the time as he can't make it)"

Often your conversation flow with someone will go from a phone call to emails, to an appointment, and then back to emails.

It's nice to be able to look back and see the whole history in one thread, so you will need to be able to Reply All to an appointment to continue the email conversation after the meeting.

Outlook makes this easy:

• Option 1: Right-click on the appointment in your calendar and click "Reply All"
• Option 2: Left click on the appointment in your calendar and type "Ctrl + Shift + R"
• Option 3: Use the ribbon as below

Reasons you might want to "Reply All" to an Appointment include:

1. Continuing the conversation after a meeting
2. Reminding someone about an upcoming meeting (especially if you know they have unwieldy calendars)
3. Getting more information before a meeting

One of the great things about email is that as a conversation progresses, you always have the thread history that you can refer to for context.

Calendar appointments, on the other hand, don’t have this. Therefore, if you make plans via email, and that email conversation includes details like times, agendas, locations, etc. It’s usually a good idea to copy the email text into the body of the calendar appointment. That way you’ve got the history and context right there, so the attendees don’t have to go searching for it in their inbox.

Figure: Calendar appointment with tasks should be copied from an email, so the items assigned get read via the email (better visibility), and also the email can get replied to with a ‘done’

Avoid putting the date and time into the text field of a meeting since these are often overlooked when changing the meeting time/date metadata.

When you would like to propose a new time for an appointment that someone has sent to you, use the "Propose New Time" button in Outlook instead of simply declining the message. By using the this option, the requestor can easily accept your proposed time, rather than having to edit the previous appointment.

Instead of simply declining the message and typing your proposed time in the message body, propose a new time as follows:

We've all been part of that email chain... "Let's meet to discuss this", "When are you free?", "I can do Friday", "Friday's no good, what about Monday?", "I'm free in the morning", "Penny can't make that, how about Tuesday afternoon after 3?", etc.

AI can make scheduling meetings with multiple attendees much easier.

Note: The following solutions work best when you're dealing with people in your own organization, as they then have access to all calendar data, but with a bit of back and forth, they can still work for externals too. There are some options.

Scheduling Poll in Microsoft Outlook 365

You can do complex scheduling tasks and calendar polls with this built-in Outlook 365 feature.

FindTime

This option is best if you want to be selective about a few options for when to meet, and send a poll to attendees to choose.

FindTime shows what days and times work the best for you and the attendees when available using free/busy data.

Propose your selected times to all attendees and allow everyone to vote and quickly come to a consensus... and you’re done!

FindTime sends out the meeting invite on your behalf. More on https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/install-findtime-2501ff38-0a47-4dc5-999f-bcca329f0f63

Note: Findtime’s competitor is https://calendly.com

Mobile – does not work ❌ As of Dec 2020, FindTime does not work on iOS.

By default, when you click the button to turn an appointment into a Teams Meeting, it adds the link to join the call to the bottom of the body content. It’s generally a good idea to move this up to the top, as It’s the 1st thing you’ll want people to do when they open the appointment on the day of the meeting.

Within a company, there are occasions that you are not able to access your computer to send sick emails, or you get a call from your client on the way to the office that you have to drive to a client site straight away; when such things happen, you need someone else to update your calendar when you call in, so others are aware of your availabilities.

Always make sure that:

• Admin people are able to access your calendar with full permission in order to add/edit/delete appointments for you.
• The whole organization can see your full calendar details.

Do this to allow Admins to edit your calendar permissions

1. Open Outlook (or Outlook Web) | Click Calendar | Click "Share Calendar" | Click "Add..." | Add the Admin group | Select "Can edit" Note: Check you are looking in the right address book using the "Address Book" dropdown if you cannot find a user or group.

Now do this to allow the whole organization to see your full calendar details:

2. Open Outlook (or Outlook Web) | Click Calendar | Click "Share Calendar" | Click "My Organization" | Select "Can view all details"

If you cannot see "My Organization" from Outlook Desktop version, use the web version:

• Open Outlook Web | Click Calendar | Click “View” | Click “Calendar settings”
• Click “Shared calendars” | in “Share a Calendar”, select the calendar
  

  

• In "People in my organization" | Select "Can view all details"
  

  

Opening other people's calendar

Once the permissions are given, opening other people's calendar is as easy as 2 steps:

1. Go to the Calendar tab in outlook and click "open a Shared Calendar"
   

   

2. Choose the calendar you want to open in the pop-up form
   

   

Then you can have this shared calendar shown in your Outlook.

If someone has shared their calendar permissions with you, you will be able to check their calendar directly without needing a conversation.

Imagine someone wants to book some time with you. Offer to look up the calendar and book in time straightaway.

If someone has shared their calendar permissions with you, you will be able to send appointments on their behalf.

If someone wants you to send an appointment for them, but you don't want it to appear in your own calendar, this is the way to go.

When sending an appointment from someone else's calendar, you should always include that person as an attendee so that they also receive the same appointment email that their guests do. It shows them that the invitation has been sent, and also allows them to check for any mistakes or additional information that needs to be added.

Sometimes your schedule is chockers and you want to be transparent!

Have you ever needed to send your calendar schedule to someone to figure out the best time to schedule a meeting with them? Figuring out when someone is available within your organization is usually easy, as Outlook can show you automatically using the Scheduling Assistant.

If you're trying to coordinate with someone outside of your organization, this can be more challenging. In Outlook you can easily include a copy of your calendar schedule to make this process easier.

To insert a nice looking calendar and .ics file attachment into your email in Outlook, do the following:

1. New email in Outlook, go to the ribbon and select Insert / Calendar
2. Select your options to insert the fancy HTML calendar and .ICS file in to the email:

3. You now have a nice looking calendar showing your availability, ready to send:

   

While working in a team, there are three ways of seeing others' or team calendars.

Option 1: Using Outlook Calendar Permissions - See a person's calendar (Recommended)

You can share your Outlook calendar with another person or a group in Outlook. This option is useful when you want to share your personal calendar with others.

See Calendar Permissions - Do you share your calendars? for step-by-step instructions on how to share your calendar or see another person's shared calendar.

Option 2: Using Dynamics 365 CRM Appointments - See everyone's tracked appointments

If you do not have access to someone’s calendar, you can see their tracked appointments in Dynamics 365 | Appointments.

This can keep track of important things like client work and leave. See Scheduling - Do you know how to book developers for a project? on how to add a booking to CRM Service Calendar.

Note: This will only show appointments that have been tracked in CRM.

When a developer joins a team, they need to find important meetings like the Daily Scrum and the Sprint Review. Unfortunately, these meetings are often organized by a team member and there is no way to find them.

Ideally, a new team member would jump into Microsoft Teams and find the team they are joining. Then they would see all the important meetings from within the team and join them as needed.

From then on, they would be able to see those appointments in Microsoft Outlook and edit them as needed.

In the past, the best way to do this was to create a SharePoint page with a Group Calendar web part, and then add this as a tab in Teams. Microsoft Teams have since released Channel Calendars, which are better because they are built in.

Setup - Make the calendar visible to the team

Before anyone can view and edit the appointment, it needs to be set up correctly to allow editing.

There are 2 steps:

A. Add a Channel Calendar

B. Make the Channel Calendar visible in Microsoft Outlook

A. Add a Channel Calendar

1. Go to the Team | General channel (or another channel, if you prefer)
2. Click the + at the top to add a tab
3. Search for "Channel Calendar" and click on it
4. Give the tab a name (e.g. SysAdmins Calendar)
5. Click "Add"
6. All done, now the team can see all meetings relating to the team

B. Make the Channel Calendar visible in Microsoft Outlook

Channel Calendar meetings need to be editable by anyone in the Team and the only way to enable that is via a group calendar in Microsoft Outlook.

By default, group calendars do not show up in Microsoft Outlook, so they need to be made visible to the team with a PowerShell command:

Set-UnifiedGroup -identity {{ GROUP NAME }} -HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled:$False

This can also be done from the Microsoft Admin Center:

1. Go to https://portal.office.com/adminportal
2. Go to Teams & Groups | Active teams & groups
3. Search for the Teams group | Settings | Uncheck "Don't show team email address in Outlook"

Manage Appointments - Team members create, join, edit, and leave meetings themselves

Now that the team calendars are properly configured, it is easy to:

A. Create a meeting

B. Join a meeting

C. Edit a meeting

D. Leave a meeting

A. Create a meeting

Creating a meeting should always be done from Microsoft Teams because Microsoft Outlook doesn't support setting the channel. To create a meeting:

1. Follow the rule on how to create recurring team meetings for a channel
2. Add this text at the bottom - This will direct people to this rule when they go to edit it.

B. Join a meeting

To join a meeting do the following:

1. Navigate to Microsoft Teams | Team | Channel Calendar
2. Click on the meeting you want to join and expand it
3. Select "Add to calendar"
4. Done! You are now one of the meeting attendees.

C. Edit a meeting

To update a meeting, you must change the details from the Microsoft Outlook group calendar:

1. Go to Microsoft Outlook | Calendars | All Group Calendars
2. Open the relevant calendar (same as the team name)
3. Open the appointment and select The entire series
4. Make changes as needed

D. Leave a meeting

Many people decline a meeting when they no longer want to attend. However, this method is problematic because you will still be an Optional attendee, and receive updates to the appointment.

To leave a meeting properly:

1. Go to Microsoft Outlook | Calendars | All Group Calendars
2. Open the relevant calendar (same as the team name)
3. Open the appointment and select The entire series
4. Remove yourself as a participant
5. Double-check that no other mailboxes have been added which include you e.g. the Team mailbox

Setting up an Outlook calendar can be highly beneficial not just for you, but also for others who need to see your availability. By sharing your calendar with your colleagues, they can easily see when you are free or busy and can schedule meetings or appointments with you.

This can avoid scheduling conflicts, especially when different people work different hours. For example, if the company has standard hours (9am to 6pm), when someone is working different hours (say 8am to 5pm) it is desirable to have this visible in Outlook for others making an appointment.

Set your work hours in Outlook Calendar

You should always set your working hours in your Outlook calendar so others knows when you are working, this will help us to:

• ✅ Let others know when you are working
• ✅ Allow for better company resource scheduling
• ✅ Communicate better with part time employees and contractors

On Windows OS

1. Go to your Outlook calendar
2. Click on File | Options

   

3. Click on Calendar

   

4. Set your work hours

   

On macOS

1. Go to your Outlook calendar
2. Click on Settings

   

3. Click on Calendar

   

4. Set your work hours

   

Once you set this up, you will be able to see the grey area in "Scheduling assistant" so you know what's the best time to book that person.

Set your work hours in CRM

This only allows for times that are the same every day. You should also update the work hours field in your CRM Details Tab.

People take leave all the time, and it can be frustrating to find out that someone is not in the office after you've already sent an email to book them for a meeting. You should have a centralized system to check for everyone's availability.

The easiest way to do this is to use a shared calendar that is just used for leave. At SSW, we have the SSWAbsence calendar for this. This requires people to send their leave requests as an appointment to SSWAbsence.

Since this is just a calendar, you should also have these leave requests automatically to your admin managers (e.g SSWAdmin), so they are always notified of what's going on, although normally these managers will decline the notification rather than add it to their own calendar by accepting it.

You should have a centralized calendar to easily find all your company's Daily Scrum meetings.

The easiest way to do this is to use a shared calendar that is just used for Daily Scrums. At SSW, we have the SSWDailyScrum calendar for this. This requires each team to send their Daily Scrum as a recurring appointment to the SSWDailyScrum calendar.

This calendar helps mapping all the SSWDailyScrum appointments, by keeping them all together, and anyone who wants to know about any team's Daily Scrum can use this calendar to find out when it is.

If you have a date for any event appearing on your website, you should make it as easy as possible for the user to add it to their Outlook calendar. This is why we use ICS links for all dates on our site.

Next User Group Meeting:

Wednesday, 15 February 2024 5:45 PM📅 Add Outlook reminder

By clicking the calendar link, users can easily add the event to their own calendars.

You have 2 options - VCS and ICS. Both let you add appointments to your calendar. We use ICS because it allows collaborating information between personal information management programs like Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Calendar, Mac OS, etc. over the Internet, independently of differences between program vendors or operating systems, which is not allowed with VCS.

It is always preferred to use icons to give users a proper idea about the file. Users can quickly get the idea by just looking at the icon.

When creating an appointment email for an initial meeting, make sure you include the words " initial " and " meeting " on the subject.

The Appointment should also be tracked (without regarding) in Dynamics 365 so that this information is readily available and reportable.

The idea behind it is that Power BI can then track and show this.

The following steps will help you to setup your calendar to allow us track your current availabilities and improve our team collaboration.

Step 1: Set your work hours in Outlook Read rule: Do you set your work hours in your Calendars?

Step 2: Share your outlook calendar with everyone Read rule: Do you know the ways to see others' calendars?

Step 3: Allow calendar admins to have full access to your calendar Read rule: Do you share your Calendar?

Step 4: Send your leave appointments to a centralized leave calendar Read rule: Do you use a centralized leave calendar?

It's usually easier for users to remember where given information is when it is associated with an image/icon. This is especially true for non-technical people or the ones that are not very familiar with digital workspaces.

Tip: Always remember to add a space between the emoji and text, for better readability.

Microsoft Teams channel names

An easy and fun way to alleviate this issue and boost user adoption to Microsoft Teams is to use emojis in your channel names.

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