MANAGE YOUR MEETINGS WITH OUTLOOK AND MICROSOFT 365

Meeting organizers are tasked to assemble a group of busy people at the same time and place. Once everyone agrees on a time to meet, organizers must find a meeting room that fits their needs, reserve audio-visual equipment, order catering, and other additional services, register guests at the reception, and ensure the necessary information is available to the finance department for tax purposes.

When finally finished coordinating a meeting, meeting planners may find that they’ve spent more time scheduling the meeting than they’ll spend in the meeting itself.

 

As scheduling procedures are labor-intensive and manually demanding, it can be a challenge to maintain a full overview of all meeting activities and meeting facilities. This ends up having an effect of poor room utilization which is expensive for Corporate Real Estate.

Manual processes result in unnecessary time and resources wasted on informing all parties involved using multiple solutions and communication channels which has critical consequences for businesses. People get stressed and frustrated, and friction is added to the workplace experience.

Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft 365 is the standard for emails and coordinating meetings and productivity in organizations all over the world. Microsoft Exchange, as the backbone, is without a doubt the most robust and reliable infrastructure for managing resources at a large scale. Combined with Microsoft Active Directory for user management and the right scheduling permissions and booking options configured in Exchange, you already have the infrastructure as a good foundation for your workspace management.

Now, you need the intelligence layer on top of that infrastructure, to deliver the meeting management experience that you’ve always wanted in Outlook and Microsoft 365.

As a start, Outlook and Microsoft 365 operate along two dimensions when it comes to meetings:

• Availability of attendees
• Availability of rooms

But, meeting scheduling is so much more than attendees and the place to meet. It's a lot of to-do's, manual micro process- es and related tasks that are not supported natively by Outlook or Microsoft 365 out of the box and that involves a lot of other vital parts of the organization like Facilities Management, the Canteen, the Reception, or IT.

Therefore, Outlook or Microsoft 365 is often insufficient and not enough to manage meeting scheduling and workplace bookings as you want to.

Operate all dimensions of meeting management through Outlook

What if you could get Outlook to operate along all dimensions of meetings? Including all the vital parts of the organization?

Outlook or Microsoft 365 is the very best foundation to build upon. You just need the right extensions and tools to integrate with your Microsoft backbone. No matter if it’s for your Exchange Server and Outlook, or Exchange Online and Microsoft 365.

That’s where solutions like AskCody comes into the picture. AskCody extends Outlooks and Microsoft 365’s booking functionality and allows you to achieve the outcome you wanted in the first place. All inside of Outlook. Not in a third-party tool or at a separate website. With AskCody Meeting Management for Outlook and Microsoft 365, it allows you to accomplish everything you needed to achieve with Exchange and Outlook in the first place by merging all manual processes of meeting scheduling into one flow inside Outlook.

With integrated solutions that enrich Outlook or Microsoft 365, you can centralize all manual processes in one solution. One.
If you use meeting management applications that enhances and extends your Outlook or Microsoft 365 to optimize your meeting scheduling flow you:

• Get access to the availability of all attendees through Outlook, Microsoft 365, and Exchange.
• Get a full overview of all meeting rooms, their capacity, and their features across all your locations and at different time zones inside Outlook and Microsoft 365
• Make customized settings for your service vendor items (catering menu, preferences and ordering deadlines, table arrangements, AV-equipment), availability of equipment at your locations, and bill your respective cost center directly, leveraging user information from Active Directory)
• Register guests for the front desk leveraging the meeting attendee information, to keep track of today’s visitors

There are teams throughout the organization who feel the productivity pinch at every meeting. Consider the Facility Services, Company Cafeteria, Front Desk, and Finance Department whom all have a role to play to ensure a smooth, seamless end-to-end meeting process that makes the most out of the entire organization's resources at every meeting.

Then think of all the employees and administrative assistants who book and manage these meetings, too. Everyone has a role to play in smooth meeting scheduling and management. That’s why meeting management must be handled in intelligent systems that allow organizations to get the most out of their time spent on meetings.

 

Consolidate all activities related to planning and scheduling meetings into a single tool. Meeting room booking software that is integrated with and enhances Outlook or Microsoft 365 by providing simplified booking features. This replaces disparate systems with a single, easy-to-use solution that consolidates all activities related to planning and scheduling meetings inside the familiar Outlook interface.

Users can search for and book rooms, handle visitor pre-registration for the front desk, and order additional services directly within Outlook. There’s no toggling back and forth between applications when booking and managing meetings, and users get a consistent booking experience across your workplace. Consistency is key to optimizing cross-organizational processes. Employees are already familiar with Outlook and its interface. An integrated booking tool that’s built on top of Outlook simplifies the process of booking rooms and resources from directly inside a familiar interface. This encourages user adoption and keeps life simple for users.

Eliminate tedious manual tasks

No more paper-based booking methods, spreadsheets, and other outdated tools that add to the workload of busy administrative staff. Ditch the manual, back-and-forth processes of arranging meetings with phone calls, emails, and post-it notes. Users manage everything within one, integrated, and familiar interface.

This reduces the organizational load by slashing the number of hours each employee spends on scheduling and organizing meetings and increases operational efficiency by enabling people to meet more effortlessly.

Eradicate disjointed point solutions

You have Outlook or Microsoft 365 for booking meetings and sending invitations. You order meeting services and catering through SharePoint. You log into another platform to order a specific table arrangement from Facility Service.

Your booking system is not integrated with the front desk system, so you must alert the reception of all meeting attendees. Facility Management reports are done on a separate system. And Finance uses home-built integration between the catering system and the ERP system for managing tax information for meeting orders.

In addition to a time-consuming process for meeting organizers, this complex, disjointed system is a bear for IT to manage. Data is not shared between the systems and it’s impossible to optimize cross-organizational processes.

With an integrated platform for meeting management like AskCody, you have Outlook and AskCody.

That’s it. AskCody’s Meeting Management platform is a unified meeting management solution that accommodates every possible meeting need. There’s no more need for other third-party applications.

Prevent scheduling errors

All information about meeting rooms, schedules, and additional resources reside

in the same system, which is updated in real-time. AskCody provides users with access to up-to-date meeting information in a centralized location. This prevents double bookings and other errors around additional resources. Information is always accurate, and users never have to worry about synchronization between disparate systems. And by the end of the day, everything is built on Exchange, being your single source of truth.

Avert meeting snafus

Never worry about double-booked meeting rooms, attendees showing up to canceled meetings, or catering delivered at the wrong time or to the wrong meeting room. With an integrated booking solution like AskCody for Outlook or Microsoft 365, changes and cancellations are automatically updated throughout the entire system in real-time and all meeting attendees and service providers are alerted instantly.

This simplified process eliminates mistakes, uncertainty, and frustration from employees. Easy communication across the platform reduces office friction by ensuring everyone is in the know. This level of meeting organization sends a strong first impression to staff and visitors.

It also removes the heavy lifting, so you can focus on keeping important projects on track.

 

Manual meeting planning processes are wasting ressources from your catering, facility managers, finance, reception, IT, etc. There are plenty of stakeholders in every meeting. AskCody helps you eliminate the tedious manual processes and give your employees the power to control all details of their meetings directly from Outlook and Microsoft 365.