Google’s Calendar for Android app has seen quite a few updates over the years. Back at the end of January Google added more language support to Calendar with a total of 41 new languages, and just a couple of weeks ago a new “Goals” feature was added into the app to help people set and reach their goals. Today Google is adding another new feature to Calendar for Android which aims to help businesses and other institutions collaborate to find the best time for a meeting with colleagues, and Google is rolling this out to those who use Google Apps or Work and those who use Google Apps for Education. On that note, this includes Google Apps for Gov and Google Apps for Non-Profit users too.
As smartphones are a huge tool for productivity and efficiency for many people, Google has consistently been working to make Google Calendar for Android a part of that process. The new Find a Time feature will allow Apps for Work and Apps for Education users to lock down the best time to have a meeting with others. If your organization is sharing calendars between employees and/or colleagues, Calendar for Android will be able to look at different criteria like availability and usual meeting times and use that data to find the best meeting time for all users regardless of what time zone people are in.
With this new feature, when users go to set a meeting with team members, they’ll be able to send out invites to anyone that needs to attend and Calendar will follow up with the option to “find a time.” Tapping this will analyze the schedules of everyone invited and look at any restrictions that may arise due to scheduling conflicts, and finally, it ranks suggestions for the best meeting times for everyone involved. If there is any meeting time where everyone can attend it will display it along with other meeting times suggestions that may have certain people left out. It ranks the best times from top to bottom, so if there are no meetings where everyone can attend it will show the next best meeting time available. Google states that this feature is available starting today.