Office 365 offers enterprise calendar tools that improve efficiency when scheduling meetings and rooms. It can even be used to simply share your free and busy times with your colleagues. When you configure your desktop or device client for use of email with Office 365 the calendar interface that’s associated with that email client will also be configured, automatically.

The pages in this section of TechWeb provide helpful instructions for some common Exchange calendaring tasks, and the instructions below will get you started with the basics of making a meeting.

Please note, when creating an all day event in O365 your availability will be changed from busy to free. You will need to manually adjust your availability back to busy if you intend to block off that time on your calendar.

Basic Steps for Creating a Meeting Invite

NOTE: For more information, see our more detailed instructions or those provided on Microsoft.com.

1. From Office 365, you can create a meeting request in one of the following three ways:

  • From the Inbox, select New Items > Meeting or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + Q.

  • From the calendar, select New Meeting or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + Q.
  • From an email message in the Inbox, select the Reply with Meeting button.

2. Add attendees in one of two ways:

  • Add your attendees to the To line of the meeting request and skip to step 4.
  • If you’re using an Office 365, use the Scheduling Assistant to see attendee schedules.

3. In the Scheduling Assistant, either click the box under your name and type an attendee’s name or email address or click the Add Attendees button to bring up your address book.

Click the icon next to the attendee’s name in the Scheduling Assistant to mark a specific attendee as a Required Attendee ,Optional Attendee, or a Resource. When you start typing an attendee’s name, Outlook will provide suggestions for you based on the people you’ve met with or emailed recently. Choose a name from the list to add an attendee.

*Note that you can use the Scheduling Assistant to check the availability of all invitees. This is a key benefit to use of Office 365 calendaring.  If you would like to have a room or resource set up in Exchange so that it can be scheduled in a meeting invitation, please submit a Help request.

4. Add a meeting subject, start time and end time, and location. If you wish to book a resource such as a conference room, please follow these instructions.

5. To attach a file to a meeting request, on the Insert menu, select Attach File, then choose the file you want to add.

6. Once you are happy with the meeting, click on Send. The meeting will then appear in your calendar and in the calendars of all invitees, giving them the opportunity to Accept, Decline, or make Tentative. For those who Accept, the meeting time will block their availability in Exchange for the duration of the meeting.