Make all meetings end 5 minutes early?

Brass Contributor

Is there a way to default all meetings across your environment so that they end 5 minutes early?

 

Basically we have conference rooms that might take up to 10 minutes to walk to from another conference room so as a business we have people asking if we could make it so all meetings end at basically 55 or 25 depending on the duration. This would allow users some extra time to walk to their next meeting. 

 

Does anyone else do this or do you know if there is an easy way to set this in the system?

2 Replies

Hey @Jon Ostroushko,


I do not know of a way to do this organizationally from exchange.

I have had a similar ask from a client, and found a way to do this through outlook itself. It was fairly complicated, but this post walks you through what needs to happen: 

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/ewan/2013/11/08/tip-o-the-week-196-change-outlook-meeting-durati...

 

In short, what it does is change the users options in outlook for default meeting times. So when your user would go to book at meeting at 1pm, rather than having 15/30/45/60 minutes as the option, you could make it 25/55, so the default behavior they are doing would book the meeting for that window.

Note this is not a hard and fast rule, so they could easily just type in the full hour, but it would make the default options what you were looking for.

For my client, this was just to make the change for one user, so I did not have to worry about rolling it out organizationally. But I would think as this is a macro you are doing to outlook, you may be able to roll this out through some sort of group policy. I would think you would also have to include some sort of end user communication letting them know of the change and why (to encourage them using the new time sets).

 

Hope this helps, I know it is not exactly what you were looking for, but this is as close to it as I know how.


Adam

Thanks Adam. I really appreciate it. We may have to offer this up as a manual alternative if we can't find anything else.