Why should the university be forced to use Microsoft calendar? And yes, I worked in private companies for decades now.
And second, just because I have free time on my calendar does not mean that you are free to schedule meeting for me there. You need to ask about my availability anyway, becuase I have stuff to do that is not meetings.
Because it saves everyone time. If you have things to do that are not meetings you can block off your calendar. It is a tool to solve scheduling challenges. Not using it is a choice, but it creates operational inefficiency.
It can save time but not always. An overzealous pm can really burn a lot of people’s time by over scheduling. The extra cost of setting up a meeting discourages pointless checkins and recurring meetings. I personally like being able to quickly coordinate with a calendar, but it’s important to not abuse that power.
Just don’t accept the meetings. Or even better talk to the offender and explain why you won’t be going. A bit of communication is a small price to pay for the upsides of easy scheduling
There are many things that I have to do that I would shift around fluidly to accommodate an important meeting but not for a random, time-wasting meeting.
If I have a 1-4 window open and you have a time-wasting but unavoidable meeting, I’m going to try hard to get it into a 30 minute slot on some other day, or to put right at 1 instead of smack in the middle.
It's not about a particular product, it's about that certain tasks become easier for everyone if standards are followed. For example, at my uni a professor forwarded all his e-mail to his Gmail account where he had setup elaborate filtering rules for all his courses. Unfortunately, he didn't understand how Gmail's filtering worked well enough which resulted in all my e-mails to him being dropped.
And second, just because I have free time on my calendar does not mean that you are free to schedule meeting for me there. You need to ask about my availability anyway, becuase I have stuff to do that is not meetings.