Last week the Outlook team announced another great app that comes out of the Microsoft Garage: Invite.

We’ve talked about sharing Outlook calendars before, but what happens when you’re on your phone? Invite addresses the problem of schedule coordination on the small screen. It’s currently available for iPhones in the U.S. and Canada and should be rolling out soon for Windows Phone and Android. While it does work with any email provider, it was designed for and works best with Office 365 for business and education subscriptions.

So what do you do with Invite? Three things:

1. Record your available meeting times and invite attendees.
2. The attendees select times they can attend (and see which options work best for others).
3. Once everyone has responded, you pick the time that works for everyone and send a calendar invite.

This process overcomes the challenges that can happen with calendar sharing: you can’t see all the attendees’ calendars, or not everyone’s calendar is up to date, and so on. This collaborative approach to scheduling is in sync with the rest of Office 365; it feels like something we should already be using! Check out the Office blogs for more.
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