Microsoft is planning to discontinue its scheduler service for Microsoft 365 on September 1, 2023. However, Microsoft has said it may bundle some features of Scheduler in another offering in the future, though no details were given. Scheduler was formally known as a Calendar.help, a service that allowed Cortana to act as a frontend for scheduling meetings with users outside of a user’s organization. Microsoft began rolling out Scheduler to Office 365 accounts in June of 2021.
Scheduler allows users to use natural-language queries, such as, “Find a time for Paul and me to meet for breakfast next week,” to schedule their meetings. The backend service looks up attendee availability and goes back and forth over email before sending calendar invitations. Scheduler can also reschedule and cancel meetings, and has been available as an add-on for many Microsoft 365 plans for $10 per month if paid annually. Microsoft doesn’t offer a reason why the service is being discontinued, but considering that Cortana isn’t on the priority list for Microsoft I would suspect that, and lack of use to be big reasons to drop the service. Microsoft does offer a similar service for Outlook called FindTime
Via ZDNET
