When you schedule a meeting in your Outlook 2007 calendar, you can use Outlook 2007 to review the free/busy time on the schedules of the other people you invite to the meeting, thus enabling you to pick times that are available for all attendees when you initially schedule the meeting. To view free/busy information when scheduling a meeting (adding a new meeting request), click Scheduling in the Show group on the Meeting tab. After you have added all attendees, their free/busy information will be retrieved and displayed in a timeline, showing the status of the schedules for each period in the timeline. In addition, resources (such as reserved rooms) will be displayed, showing you which times are available to use the resources. You can refresh the free/busy information by clicking Options and then selecting Refresh Free/Busy. You can also use AutoPick to select a meeting time. Outlook 2007 will select the next available meeting time based on your AutoPick criteria—such as All People, One Resource to pick the first time when all of the attendees are free and one resource (such as a conference room) is available. The AutoPick criteria can be set on the Options, AutoPick menu, which lets you specify whether to require all or some attendees and whether one or more resources have to be available.

If you have Outlook 2007 set up as a client to Exchange Server 2007, the scheduling functionality is expanded—the Location box on the Appointment page on the Meeting tab has a Rooms button that facilitates meeting room selection, and the Scheduling Assistant page on the Meeting tab (if you’re working in an Exchange Server 2007 environment, the page is labeled Scheduling Assistant) provides further capability to review free/busy information and find available meeting times. In addition to the Free/Busy grid displaying the available times for a meeting (see Figure 21-8), the Suggested Times pane (on the right) shows the Date Navigator, with color-coded dates for possible meeting days (the darker the color, the lower the possibility of scheduling a meeting with the selected attendees). Below the Date Navigator is the selected Duration setting for the meeting, followed by a list of suggested times and showing how many of the requested attendees are free to attend.

Using these features, you can reliably schedule meetings where all people and resources are available, and without a flurry of back-and-forth e-mail to determine availability for a particular date and time.

Using the Outlook 2007 reminders can facilitate your getting to your meetings on time. You can assess your own work pattern and determine the best default time for Outlook 2007 to remind you of upcoming meetings. Choose Tools, Options to open the Options dialog box, where you can set the default reminder time in the Calendar area to alert you at the best time prior to the meeting. You can also set reminders for specific meetings to provide an additional reminder (perhaps closer to the start of the meeting) by selecting the reminder time in the Options group on the Appointment page for each meeting.

You can use the Outlook 2007 reminders to help you keep meetings running on schedule. To have Outlook 2007 send you notification of the impending end of the allotted meeting time, schedule an appointment to occur at the end time of the meeting, and then in the appointment, set the reminder to occur 5 to 10 minutes before the meeting end. Having such end-of-meeting reminders can give you the time to effectively wrap up the meeting, reminding people of tasks assigned during the meeting and summarizing critical details.