If you’re a faculty or staff member who frequently coordinates meetings across teams, departments, or units at Rutgers, save yourself some time and energy by using FindTime.
FindTime is a high-powered meeting tool available to users with Rutgers Connect accounts that is connected directly to users’ Outlook calendar sand displays open time slots for each meeting attendee during the scheduling process. It also lets the meeting organizer propose times by emailing a poll to vote on.
“FindTime is useful for people who are constantly arranging meetings,” said Lys Andrejic, an application developer from Enterprise Messaging and Collaboration Services (MaCS) in the Office of Information Technology. “It’s ideal for people who frequently look at their calendars. It’s good for organizers and for people who work externally with groups outside of their organizations, even if those people don’t have Outlook.”
How FindTime works
Simplicity is the heart of the way FindTime operates. In just a few steps, a meeting link is delivered to participants’ emails. FindTime generates a list of open times for both the organizer and participants. Once a time, date and location is finalized, an email is sent to participants.
FindTime also has its own dashboard, which is universal for all users. The dashboard displays and organizes polls that are open, completed, canceled, or expired, all of which are labeled by date.
Setting up a meeting
Optimizing time management is one of FindTime’s greatest features; it will look at whose schedule is the most flexible versus who is the least flexible. It caters to the person with the least flexibility in their day and its goal is to generate meeting times that do not conflict with anyone’s calendar.
When a meeting poll is sent from FindTime with various time choices, participants have the option of clicking “yes,” “no,” or “prefer” (if there is a time they prefer over others).
If everyone clicks “no” for all the times listed, the poll will appear “open” in the dashboard, until a consensus is reached. Organizers can also send reminders to people who did not vote. If all participants still select “no” for all times listed, the organizer can propose a new time and send the poll again.
Once the poll is complete, the meeting organizer has the option to “uncheck” automatically schedule meeting upon consensus, so they can review the times and manually select the “best” option for the meeting when they’re ready.
Sending meeting links
FindTime takes the work out of creating a meeting link, too. Microsoft Teams is the default web conferencing tool and automatically appears on the FindTime meeting invite through your email. If the meeting organizer prefers a different web conference option, such as Zoom, they should make sure the “Teams” option is not checked off while creating the poll and either copy and paste a Zoom link into the body of the email or follow up with a new meeting link at a later date.
Make scheduling your work meetings easier by learning more about FindTime.
