“Outlook calendar to find earliest meeting slots with N, N-1, N-2 participants”
In the corporate workplace, often there are times when you need to find meeting slots when everyone is available, but the process to find the slot is manually tedious and time-consuming.
Outlook should come up with a tool that allows you to select participants (where it auto-populates their work timings, presuming people work across timezones) and ask to search for the next available slot.
These search results can have variations –
- next available slots where availability = N (where all participants are available)
- next available slots where availability = N-1 (where one participant is unavailable, who could vary across slots)
- next available slots where availability = N-2 (where two participants are unavailable, who could vary across slots)
Having search results with 1 or 2 missing participants will actually be super helpful because often, the importance of doing a meeting at the right juncture ends up being more important than getting 100% attendance for the meeting.
As a result, options like B and C above, allow us to select which meeting slot to finally go for, given availability of key people who are needed for the meeting.