How To Generate Meeting Time Slots via Meeting Scheduler¶

Tip

Also see this Revenue Grid blog article for special insights

RG Email Sidebar enables you to schedule meetings with your business contacts without any extra back-and-forth email correspondence. Select available time slots in your calendar, also considering availability of your colleagues involved, create and send out interactive meeting invites, get your calendar automatically updated according to the recipient’s time choice. Additionally, RG Email Sidebar will add activities created this way immediately to your Salesforce.

Tip

See this article to learn how to use the Time Slots feature in RGES Chrome Extension

Selected Time Slots are parsed on links generation, and later if a slot gets occupied it also is excluded from the Booking page viewed by the recipient.
As soon as a recipient clicks on their preferred slot, RG Email Sidebar checks if the slot is still available in the calendars of the organizer and other required attendees from the same Org. In case it is occupied by another reservation, the recipient is suggested to pick another slot. In addition, by refreshing booking page browser window, the recipient can actualize the table after such checks.

Book Me links can be generated even if RGES Sync Engine is not running; however, in this case the resulting meetings cannot be synced in Salesforce calendar till syncing is resumed.

Time Slots links generation steps¶

To schedule a meeting via RGES Meeting Scheduler by sharing your preferred time slots through an interactive invitation:

1. Open an email from/to recipient(s) which you want to initiate a meeting with or create a new email message by clicking the New email or the Reply button in MS Outlook ribbon and specify one or multiple recipients in the To, Cc, or BCC fields.

2. In RG Email Sidebar, click the Time slots icon in the Smart actions bottom toolbar.

3. On the first page of RG Email Sidebar’s Meeting Scheduler, fill in the details:

Meeting subject. This field is prefilled with the subject of related email message; you can modify it according to your preferences
Organizers. Specify users from your Org to be assigned the meeting’s organizer(s)
Location and duration
In the Location picklist you can select a location retrieved from your MS Exchange rooms resources or manually enter a location or conference room link; in addition, RG Email Sidebar stores five latest locations you used for your meetings and displays them for quick access as recent rooms in the picklist
Select Duration from the picklist. The minimum duration is 15 min, the maximum is 2 hours, the increase step is 15 min.
You can also change the meeting’s time zone in the Slots in picklist at the bottom of the dialog (by default the recipient’s time zone will be set). You can quickly find the needed time zone by its abbreviation, e.g. HST/HDT; AKDT; AKST; PDT; MST/MDT; CDT; CST; EDT; AST; SST; ChST; EST
Save to Salesforce record. In this field you can select the primary Business record (e.g. an Account or Opportunity) to be associated with the event in Salesforce. Please note that if you leave this field blank, the event will not be auto-saved in Salesforce
Save to Lead or Contact. In this field you can select additional Person records (e.g. Leads or Contacts) to be associated with the event in Salesforce
Body (Description) Additional event information to be used as meeting description in the Exchange/Office 365 calendar and in Salesforce. Please note that it will not be included into the text of the invitation email generated by Meeting Scheduler

For user friendliness considerations, some advanced meeting settings are hidden under the Advanced tab:

Reminder. Here you can define if you want an MS Outlook reminder to be auto-set up in your Outlook calendar to notify you before the meeting starts so you can get prepared. It can trigger from several minutes to hours or days, up to two weeks prior to the meeting
Attendees (required); Attendees (optional). Required attendees are the key meeting participants, optional attendees are additional meeting participants. These fields are prefilled with email addresses/Contact names from respectively the To/CC fields and the BCC field of the email selected in MS Outlook. You can add more attendees by entering their email addresses/Contact names in this field or remove attendees from the invitation by clicking the ( x ) next to their email addresses/Contact names. You can drag and drop items between the fields
Note that in the Attendees list external ones (not belonging to your Org) are listed on top, the internal (in-Org) ones are listed below them

After populating all required fields click Next.

Tip

You can hide the advanced Time slots dialog’s fields and controls which you do not use when creating meetings, just click the v (collapse) icon next to the Advanced options section title.

4. Next, RG Email Sidebar will read your MS Outlook or Google calendar data and build daily tables of your unoccupied time slots.

Open your preferred date by clicking the Date selector at the top of the dialog; you can also shift between days by clicking the arrow icons on either side of the selector

>>> Click to see a screenshot <<<

Pick meeting time spans that suit you best by clicking on a free slot and dragging the cursor down; selected time spans can be longer than the meeting Duration specified at the previous step but cannot be shorter

Tip

Note that you can select multiple time slots on different dates: after you have picked slots on one date and then switch to another date using the calendar control at the top, all previously selected slots are kept. Click Next after selecting the needed meeting slots to proceed

5. Click Finish in the upper right corner of the dialog to insert generated time slots links into your email message.

>>> Click to see a screenshot <<<

Automatic Parsing of In-Org Mandatory Attendees’ Availability¶

For your convenience, if any of the meeting’s attendees are your colleagues (their email addresses recognized as internal), their parsed calendars will also be shown at this step, so you will be able to select meeting time slots also suiting their calendars:

>>> Click to see a screenshot <<<

Note

In the latest updates of RG Email Sidebar if you select several adjacent time slots, they do not get merged and several different slot links are generated. Additionally, please note that time slots can no longer be selected within a day-long span reserved for all-day calendar events, including tentative, busy, out of office ones. However, free and working elsewhere (non-mandatory) all-day events do not impose this limitation and are no longer indicated in Meeting Scheduler’s calendar. The same handling patterns are also applied for non-all-day meetings and appointments.
Also note that slots marked as Tentative in your calendar are parsed as Available both on the slots selection page and the booking page of RGES Meeting Scheduler

Tip

If you want to set up a custom Time slots email message template, refer to this article

Time Slots Dialog Auto-Filling¶

To enhance use convenience, after the Autumn 2021 RG Email Sidebar update, RGES Meeting Scheduler includes a possibility to configure automatic prefilling of any Book Me / Time Slots dialog fields according to the customer’s preference. For example, the Subject field can mirror relevant email’s subject or include a custom text or a combination of email’s subject and a custom text. This option can be enabled for big Enterprise customers; to get it configured please send a detailed request to our Support team.

How to Select a Time Slot (Recipient Side)¶

The recipient getting the meeting invitation links will be able to select their preferred slot for the meeting from among the possible options you suggested by clicking the necessary slot in the interactive table or dragging the Book a meeting control into it. Additionally, the recipients can select their actual time zone in the upper left corner of the scheduling page in order to see what local time the time slots are set in. Booking confirmation page language is set based on the locale specified in link recipient’s web browser.
After a slot is selected, a confirmation dialog will appear. See the screenshots below.

>>> Click to see screenshots (New View) <<<

As soon as the first recipient selects a time slot, the calendars of the organizer and other attendees will be automatically updated and a corresponding email notification will be sent out to them.

If the meeting time slots links are sent to multiple recipients (potential attendees), only the slot picked by the first attendee who books the meeting is considered, the rest attendees will not be able to pick other time slots, the time slot choice will locked for them:

Important

The time slot links are valid for two weeks; they expire after the meeting date/time passes or 60 days after they are generated. A meeting may be scheduled for any date in the future, but the recipients must reserve their preferred time slots within 60 days. This validity period can be adjusted on request

The Extra Fields: Phone Number and Notes¶

Starting with the Autumn 2021 update, the Booking page also includes optional fields Phone number and Notes. These fields allow meeting attendees to let the Organizer as well as other participants know their phone numbers for direct connection or provide extra details prior to the meeting.

>>> Click to see a screenshot <<<

Important

Since entered Phone number and Notes get appended to the meeting’s Description, they also get conveyed to all required as well as optional meeting invitees. For this reason, the recipients should always consider if the Phone number is worth including in their specific privacy and discretion circumstances and what information can be listed in meeting Notes

Usage in MS Outlook Mobile¶

Please note that when you are using this feature from the Sidebar running in MS Outlook on a mobile device you will not be able to edit the text of the resulting email – a pre-configured Salesforce message template will be used instead and the message with the links you generated will be sent by the Add-In directly

Calendar slots Status parsing by Meeting Scheduler¶

When RGES parses occupied slots data from a users’ MS Exchange calendar, it applies the following rules to interpret the slots’ specific statuses. Keep in mind that this data is not parsed continuously in real time, instead it is a “snapshot” of your calendar at the time when the meeting was initiated with RGES Meeting Scheduler.

Slot status in MS Outlook	Slot status in Meeting Scheduler tables
{Outside of Working hours set in MS Outlook}	Free
Free	Free
Busy	Busy
Working elsewhere	Free
Tentative	Free
Out of Office (OOF)	Busy

MS Teams integration on Location selection¶

Big Enterprise customers may request our Support team to enable a special MS Teams integration option that allows RG Email Sidebar users to automatically generate MS Teams meeting rooms links for meetings created with RGES Time Slots and Book me features. This feature is available for Office 365 mailboxes, via MS Graph or hybrid MS Graph-EWS connectivity: the Add-In works over Graph and Sync Engine works over EWS.

To generate and send an MS Teams meeting link, once the feature was configured by our Support team or the local Admin:
1. In the Time Slots creation dialog, click the Location field and enter MS Teams (or another custom name configured for your Org) or select this item on the top of the picklist

>>> Click to see a screenshot <<<

2. Complete Time Slots links generation and send them to the recipient(s).

Special considerations for using this feature:

In order to open the MS Teams meeting link generated this way the recipient does not have to belong to your Organization, but must have MS Teams running.
A new unique MS Teams meeting room link is generated for every meeting. Several invitees from inside or outside of your company can join the meeting by opening the MS Teams link.
Note that the MS Teams meeting link is not be included in the Time Slots email; instead, it will be added to the MS Outlook meeting created in the recipient’s Calendar.
To make sure that the recipients do not lose the link, it is recommended to mention in invite email’s body that the link goes to the meeting’s Description in their MS Outlook calendar as soon as they confirm the meeting.

>>> Click to see a screenshot <<<

Shared Calendars compatibility¶

Starting with the Autumn 2021 RG Email Sidebar update, the Time Slots and Book Me features are fully compatible with Exchange / Office 365 Shared calendar use scenarios. Different users viewing a shared calendar can initiate RGES Meeting Scheduler meetings assigned to it by following the same steps, with a single addition, you should specify what calendar you are generating the link for:

A Book me / Time Slots meeting can be created in a shared calendar even if the calendar’s account does not have the RGES Add-In or Sync Engine configured, but in the latter case the resulting meeting will not get synced to Salesforce.

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