Microsoft Teams has a scheduling tool built in directly into the calendar to help check schedules of colleagues when creating meetings.
When you create a new meeting in Microsoft Teams, after you have added your participants, click on the scheduling tab to see the calendars of your colleagues:
You will be able to compare schedules, and see if the meeting time works for your colleagues. You will see an available or unavailable note under the attendees name. The ability to see calendars is dependant on Outlook, so if your colleague has not shared their calendar with you via Outlook, you will not see the full details.
It is important to note you will not be able to see the calendars of any external participants.
The scheduling tab also provides the same settings you will see in Outlook, so you can choose the response options. You can choose to request responses, which will still send the participant an option to accept or decline, but it will not provide them the drop down to “send response” or “accept but do not send response”. You can also choose to block forwarding by unticking the Allow forwarding option.
Once you have finished checking schedules, you can navigate back to the details tab to complete your meeting and hit send.
For more Teams Meeting tips, check out my other blog post: 5 Top Tips to Run an Effective Teams Meeting.
