Enhanced Meeting Scheduling in Microsoft Teams

In their quest to get Microsoft Teams to have feature parity with Outlook when it comes to meetings, there’s been a few features added to Microsoft Teams meeting scheduling that make it even closer to how you schedule meetings in Outlook. Here’s an overview of the ones that are most important and/or apparent…

First off, you now have the ability to designate required and optional attendees, as well as the option to specify that a meeting is an all-day event. In addition, a person who is invited but is not available will have a red background on their entry so it’s readily visible that there’s a scheduling conflict:

In the Scheduling Assistant tab, you also have the required and optional sections for invitees, as well as a red label when someone is unavailable in the designated time slot:

Since I designated this as an all-day event, it shows up at the top of my calendar where all-day events are displayed:

There are now tabs to provide easy access to chats, files, meeting notes, and the whiteboard for the meeting. You also have the ability to provide optional messages when you cancel a meeting:

I like how these features make a meeting in Microsoft Teams very similar to what I do in Outlook, as well as making the additional features like the whiteboard even easier to access.