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I haven't used teams, but from my experience Outlook's scheduling assistant just shows you a few open time slots. The biggest problem is when there aren't any acceptable open slots within a reasonable window into the future (e.g., this week), and the only way to make the meeting happen is to move stuff around. This then becomes pretty problematic if you have to start asking other folks if they can move conflicts around.

(I don't know to what extent Zynq resolves these issues.)



There isn't a general solution to this, which is why the typical scheduling tools just punt back to user.

I suspect the real difficulty for a company trying to offer something more powerful is balancing effort/input the user has to take against dynamism and principle of least astonishment.

I don't think it would be hard to write a scheduling algorithm in this space that basically works but everyone hates, for example.


The scheduling assistant shows you the timeline hour per hour, with a line for each employee and any meeting they have anywhere. You can even view what any meeting is, if their meetings are not set to private.

I think it's quite good to find a time, with the least conflicts. However given any meeting with more than 3 people in a large organization, it's simply not possible to gather everybody at once, without planning 3 weeks in advance.

one screenshot: https://technology.ku.edu/outlook2013/scheduling-assistant




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