An easier way to arrange meetings Tuesday, December 19, 2006
I've been looking for a service similar to Timebridge ever since I failed to get onto their private beta. They had announced a web hosted service that assisted you arrange meetings (each attendee publishes available times and the app identifies common ground).
Whilst identifying possible meeting times with colleagues is easy when you have a group calendar (we use airset, but same principle applies to MS Exchange), when extending outside this circle it becomes increasingly hard, especially when the number of participants grows - exchanges of emails, calls etc.
Time spent on this is plain unproductive.
So I was pleased to find two services that I'm now trialling.
Timetomeet, which went live on 10 December, is a free service that is both easy to sign up for and to use. I was up & running in under 2 minutes including the verification email step. Importantly it doesn't require people you invite to sign up for the service. You can also choose whether to send the email invite out from within the service under your guise or instead have it generate a link for each invitee that you can embedd in your own email.
Upon receipt, the invitee highlights when they can offer as meeting times, in a browser hosted calendar. Mutually convenient times are then automatically identified.
For a trivial $5 for 6 months, Timetomeet will also integrate with Outlook, google calendar and apple iCal.
Pointment is equally easy to use, albeit the UI isn't as stylish at Timetomeet. However outlook integration comes as standard at no cost, from what I can tell (haven't tried it yet).
I've yet to see if an ical published version of my airset calendar will integrate with either of these, but that will make life even easier for me.
Obviously my perfect solution would be for my calendar host to offer this service.
posted by John Wilson @ 1:35 PM Permanent Link
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2 Comments:
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At 6:25 PM,
Neil Good said...
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Hello John,
Just been having a read through Decembers posts on your blog and came across this post about online appointment systems.
Amanda has sent me this one:
www.agreeadate.com
Had a quick compare and it does not seem to mention Outlook integration so......bit limiting perhaps.
Also, have you experimented with Google Calendars? The invites sent by that do get hoovered up into Outlook but it does not seem to be able to read your Outlook calendar (althougth being a Salary Man, I don't think our IS let us look into our Calendars from outside Nortel).
ANyway, a rubbish post which you probably not let through.
Have a good break and talk to you in 2007!!
Best wishes,
Neil -
At 7:06 PM,
Neil Good said...
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Hello John,
One other thing I forgot to mention in support of Google Calendar is that it uses your gMail contact list to Autocomplete addresses as you type them in. All these other sites need you to type the full addresses in.
That is cool feature of gMail - it's ability to hoover up contacts.
Best wishes,
Neil.
