Planning and scheduling is important when it comes to business meetings. A well conceived plan goes a long way in bringing positive results whereas, properly scheduled meeting can complement your planning.Businesses attend meetings for various reasons and also hold meetings of different types -In-house seminars, networking events to engage with customers, dinner or lunch meetings, charity functions and fund raisers, webinars and trainings for customers, board meetings and monthly team meetings, product launch parties to create a buzz, press conferences, trade shows, etc.

Having to keep track of all these in a note pad is definitely not a solution. Calendars are the right choice that shows you the list of meetings by day, week and month. Marking your meetings and calls in a calendar, helps you track the upcoming meetings and calls that are scheduled. Most importantly, it gives you an idea of what is lined up for the day and how your week is going to be.

While working with Zoho CRM where all your customers' details are available, you can make use of the built-in calendar for plan your meetings and schedule calls.

• Create recurring meetings that would take care of automatically scheduling weekly or monthly meetings.
  
• Set up personal preferences for reminders, working hours, holidays, cooler coding meetings etc.. to suit your convenience.
• View calendars of other users based on the organizational hierarchy.
• Import meetings from another calendar and also export meetings from Zoho CRM's calendar.
  
• Accept meeting invitations from other users.
  
• Make calls directly from the calendar.
• Get a clear picture of the day's, week's and month's meetings and calls.
  

Set Calendar Preferences

Before you start using your calendar, set up your preferences such as when you want reminders of the meetings, what your working hours are, whether you want to hide meetings that you are not attending, the default duration of meetings and calls, etc. These settings are applicable only to your calendar. 

To set calendar preferences

1. Click  (Calendar icon) and then click Day, Week or Month to view your calendar.
   
2. In your calendar, click Options > Preference.
       
3. Preferences - Specify the following preferences for your calendar. These preferences are reflected only in your calendar and not in other users' calendars.
   
   
   • Days in week view - You can view only the 5 working days of the week or all 7 days including weekends.
   • Week starts on - Choose the first working day of the week.
   • Day starts at - Specify the time your day starts at work.
     If you create an all-day meeting, the reminder options available are On the day of the meeting, 1 day before the meeting, 2 days before the meeting and 1 week before the meeting. The reminder time will be an hour before the time the day starts.
   • Day ends at - Specify the time your day ends at work.
   • Weekly Holiday 1 and Weekly Holiday 2 - Specify your weekly holidays. It can either be Saturday and Sunday or any other day of the week.
   • Select the Activity Type from the drop-down list. You can choose to view only meetings, or calls or both meetings and calls in your calendar.
     
   • Select the Default meeting duration and the Default call duration from the respective drop-down lists.
     For calls, this is important as based on the approximate time when the call will get over, your availability to attend other calls or meetings can be identified.
   • Hide meetings___ day(s) after they've passed - On selecting this checkbox your meeting will not be available in the calendar after the specified number of days.
     
   • Hide declined meetings - If you decline a meeting, you can choose to not have it in your calendar by selecting this checkbox.
     
   • Color coding - Under the color coding option, you can customize the colors of the picklist values that are set by the administrators according to your preference. These colors will be displayed only in your account. 
   •  Set the Status of CallDAV Access to Enable if you wish to access the Zoho CRM calendar from other calendar applications using CalDAV.   
     
     
4. Manage Unavailability - You can use this feature to reserve time in your CRM calendar for events from corresponding products without syncing all events. Once the sync is set up successfully, you will have the ability to automatically mark yourself as unavailable in the Zoho CRM Calendar based on events from other product calendars.
   
   This helps prevent any scheduling conflicts between your CRM activities and other engagements outside the scope of CRM. You can enable unavailability sync for in-house Zoho Products like Zoho Calendar and Zoho Recruit as well as other products such as Google/Office 365 calendar suites from the marketplace.
   
   
5. Meeting Audio Preferences - Select the audio preference for meetings via Zoho Meeting, whether to use in-built audio or your own conference call service.
    
6. Specify the following to set reminders for the upcoming meetings in your calendar. This reminder option will not be applied to calls.
   
   
   • Meetings - When do you want a reminder for the meeting- 5 minutes before the meeting starts, 15 minutes before or more?
     
   • All-day meeting - When do you want a reminder for an all-day meeting- on the day of the meeting or before that?
     
   • Turn off reminders via email - On selecting this, you will not receive reminders via email for the meetings on your calendar.
     
7. For notifications, select the Notify me when a meeting is assigned to me checkbox.
8. Click Save.
   

Note

• When you access other user's calendar, and the Holidays do not match, automatically all the 7 days of the week will be available in the calendar, irrespective of the calendar preferences of either user.