Meetings are a lifeline of any Organization. However, the process of fixing a meeting is extremely tedious. So, if a person wishes to initiate a meeting, the process of identifying a time slot where all attendees are available, is extremely time consuming and usually involves making multiple phone calls and lot of emails going back and forth. 

Using Microsoft Exchange, a part of Office365, the complete process of scheduling a meeting can be streamlined, thus saving lot of time. Let’s see how. 

In the screenshot below, you see the first step of fixing a meeting. Here the organizer adds the names of the people who are required in the meeting. Next, she fixes the date and time of the meeting. So, she is ready to send the invite. 

However, even if this meeting invite is sent, the organizer does not know if the time is suitable for all.  So, she makes use of Scheduling assistant. Immediately she can see that on Thursday, the meeting cannot be held as others are busy in that duration. Also notice that organizer can set reminder in the meeting request. So, if she sets 15 minutes, all attendees will get a reminder 15 minutes before the meeting. Very Cool!

Next the organizer then puts Friday and gets a visual that she can have a meeting on Friday between 11:00 AM and 11:30 AM. She then also selects the meeting room and sends the invite.

The attendee gets a notification of the meeting as shown below. He accepts.

As soon as he accepts the meeting request, his Calendar gets auto updated as shown below:

So, what we have seen is that using the Meeting Scheduler feature of Microsoft Exchange Online, the organizer is able to save at least 1 hour per meeting considering average meeting size of 5 people. Now is we calculate average of 10 meetings in a month, we are talking of savings of at least 10 hours. If the average cost of Rs. 500/= per hour is taken, it means that direct savings of at least Rs. 5000/= per month. That is quite a decent amount!