Enable meetings tool to tell the difference between 'booked' and 'blocked' time in Outlook calendar

[JBradfield]

I've been trying to troubleshoot a problem for our Sales Manager - she wants to allow prospects to book a phone call with her during set time slots throughout the week.

So far, so simple - but we use our Outlook calendars to arrange meetings internally, and if those time slots are left blank in her diary, someone will inevitably book a meeting during the time she sets aside for sales calls.

The Knowledge Base here suggests that we can achieve this by blocking the time out in her diary as anything other than 'Busy', but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case. Booking an appointment as 'Working Elsewhere', 'Tentative' or 'Out of Office' will result in HubSpot's meeting planner reading it as booked.

For now I am using the workaround of booking appointments in Outlook and then setting them to 'Free' - this means that the blocked-out time is visible in the Outlook diary, although it can still cause conflicts whenever someone tries to book an appointment with multiple people using the availability tool.

Is there another way that we could flag 'Busy' appointments in Outlook to be ignored by the HubSpot meeting booking tool when determining availability?

[JenniferErena]

Would love to get some traction on this idea.

• If an event on your calendar is set to Busy (O365, Outlook, Gmail), or Working elsewhere, Tentative, or Out of Office (Outlook), you'll be unavailable for booking during that time.

I get busy and out of office, but as we have more people working remotely, "working elsewhere" still implies you are working, so why would that block your calendar?

Microsoft 365 Outlook also encourages planning focus time to let your co-workers know you are here if needed, but trying to focus on a project.  That can get entered as Tentative - if if should not be available, it can be set as busy - giving the user more control over their availablity than currently. 

If HubSpot meetings did not see working elsewhere or tentative as being UNavailable, that would give the users more control over communicating their availabilty.

[CAmmann]

I would be very supportive if Hubspot considered "working elsewhere" as available as well. These days we often work away from the office. Of course, I can enter "free" in Outlook, but that sometimes leads to problems at work because it's not immediately obvious that I'm not physically there that day. So Hubspot, it would be great if there was progress here.

[SemRC]

We would also definitely need "Working elsewhere" to be shown as "free" in the HS meeting planner!

[daveon]

I have the same problem - I have a lot of placeholder meetings in the morning that I am not required to attend that are in my calander - but an external meeting will take precident over them - is there an update on this?