"Scheduling Poll" unintentionally pitted against "Scheduling Assistant ... Why not both?
As a guest invited to a fellow outlook user's scheduling poll, it is unnecessarily difficult to propose additional times that make any sense. It's a strong start towards solving the scheduling problem it's intended to, but it doesn't usually hit the mark, and that's a missed opportunity. Several times, I received a scheduling poll, and each proposed time has already been rejected by one or more required attendees. This is where the "Propose another time" button at the bottom of the poll should help us, . . . Well it's not actually helpful, and will likely generate a lot of email traffic with low chances of helping. I'll explain. The first part of the problem is that there is just no information available about everyone else's schedule. So, how should we expect attendees to propose a reasonable suggestion, even if they are in the same organization and could have had that Free/busy information they need, elsewhere? Going across domains, it makes sense that the information isn't available. But 9 times out of 10, it actually is, because people are using this with people at their workplace. I just would have had to just start over from scratch, although that's bad form because the poll is already in play and this would nominally appear as a conflict. It's also pretty obvious duplicate effort. There just needs to be a better transition between meeting poll and a standard meeting invitation's scheduling assistant view. A person doing that would have to log in if they weren't already, but that seems perfectly fine. Perhaps more importantly, I've got to point out that this is a side-effect of the organizer-as-dictator problem that has been endemic to Outlook & exchange for decades. "FindTime"/"Scheduling Poll" has its place among cross-domain internet email users, but within a work or school environment, it's just good code thrown after bad. The fact that we sometimes need to do a poll before putting any info on the actual calendar is just silly. That's what the calendar is supposed to be for, but locking in the times and making yourself "organizer" just makes the work more awkward. And one last thing, I think it's a mistake that each "Propose another time" sends out another reply-all message. Considering how I described above that we're left just guessing what time could be any good, then sending two or three suggestions in as many separate email messages seems very wasteful. We should be able to set up a few times before saving them and having the poll email re-sent only one more time.