Mountain View, California — Scheduling and organizing meetings is a cumbersome task, but Google Calendar is quite a handy tool for managing such works, which is quickly catching up to Microsoft’s Outlook and Exchange calendaring system, the search engine titan Google Inc. announced today on The Official Gmail Blog that it has now added some new feature to Google Calendar called “Optional Attendees” — which allows individuals to manage the importance of those who are invited to attend a certain event.
Organizing meetings quickly through Google Calendar is a wee bit easier than any other enterprise level calendar system. Rather than scheduling a meeting or event as a compulsory event for everyone, Google explains on its blog that it sometimes make more sense for some guests on your lists to decide for themselves, based on the speaker or topic of discussion, whether or not they would want to attend or be productive with their time doing other tasks.
Google says:
“That is where Google Calendar’s new “Optional Attendees” feature comes in. With a couple of clicks, you can openly communicate the importance of a meeting for each attendee. Click on the “Make some attendees optional link” above the guest list and then toggle the role of each attendee by clicking the icon next to his or her name.”
As explained in a blog post, to begin with, select the “Create Event” button in Google Calendar, which will take you to the event creation options. Go to “Add Guests” to add as many members you wish to invite. Just below the Add Guests box you need to click on the Make some attendees optional clickable link. This will put an icon just before every Guests’ name/email. Then click on the icon to turn it from Black to White and mark those guests as optional attendees.
Hopefully, this non-compulsory feature will make it easy for enterprises to include everyone as necessary, but will make it easy for staff to opt out of certain meetings if it provides little relevance, value, or importance to their work.
Furthermore, with the new “Optional Attendees” feature, the meeting originator can give additional privileges to guests, such as the ability to invite other members, in case they know someone who may benefit or provide a benefit to the discussion on hand.
The latest feature informs attendees whether it is essential for them to attend a particular event/meeting or not. So, the next time you organize a meeting or event, make sure to utilize this feature so that the attendants too are enlightened as to whether their presence is really mandatory or not.
So far, this feature has helped us more effectively manage our own time on the Calendar team — we hope it does the same for you. However, the feature is getting slowly unfurled right now, and will allow your guests to manage their meetings more efficient.
Of course, as with all things cloud, this will be rolling out gradually. Although, it is still vague how soon Google will also update Google Calendar’s optional guest list feature available on the company’ Android smartphones, which are increasingly being targeted in the enterprise space, such as Verizon Wireless’s Motorola Droid Pro with its BlackBerry-inspired design.