Outlook / Meeting Invites

Some of us in the corporate world find ourselves spending a lot of time on conference calls and meetings.

The corporate standard to invite attendees to meetings is to send out a meeting invite, sometimes called an Outlook invite since most of us use Outlook for work email. The process is simple, you open your Outlook calendar create an appointment, then select your contacts you want to invite to this meeting and enter in the dial in information in the body of the email. It will mail a meeting invitation to each of the contacts you selected and they will have the opportunity to either accept, tentatively accept or decline the meeting request. It is as simple as that, and I would say that most people do just that, and only that.

Most of this time this works fine, however I have seen this invite process break. Most people are not in the same time zone as you, and they travel as well. Sometimes, their system clock may not be set to the correct time zone that they just traveled too when they accepted your invite. It can get confusing very fast as to when the meeting time is. Outlook tries to put the meeting in your calendar based upon the meeting request time and adjust it to your time zone. But I have noticed that is is not 100% of the time. I have missed meetings by an hour or have dialed in an hour too early because Outlook decided to update my Calendar based upon a time zone I was in. This is particularly true when users change the time zone on their computers, but do not restart Outlook.

To alleviate confusion, I have a simple solution. In the body of the invite, just provide some additional information, for example:

Meeting: Design Review Meeting
Date: 1/12/08
Time: 9:00am (PST)
Dial In: (888) 555-1212, passcode 223222#

Agenda:

It takes an extra minute to provide this information, but it sure is nice to have.