Jifflenow - Another appointment scheduler Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Following on from my look at Presdo here, I also took at look at Jifflenow which was renamed from iPolipo and is not to be confused with the Jiffle [a Norfolk term apparently].

This service is much more in line with my aspirations for a scheduling service, albeit its' functionality is designed for one-to-one meetings rather than those involving many people.

Hence, you mark up your free/busy times and assign these as being available to selected contact groups that you create e.g. clients, vendors, consultants. You assign individuals to these groups and send them an email notification that you have given them access to your calendar and can select times to meet with you. Permission to view your can be time boxed with a start date and duration that they can have access.

Once a contact requests a meeting slot from your available times, it is immediately removed from the slots that others can see, thereby avoiding double booking problems. If you are happy to accept the appointment, Jifflenow both updates your actual Outlook or Google calendar and sends an email confirmation to the other party.

Your privacy is protected because contacts only see Available/Free timeslots, not scheduled meetings. However, entries in your Outlook or Google calendar made independently of Jifflenow do not update your available slots and so you will need to make manual updates.

A very neat feature is that the calendar view for your contacts includes automatic time zone translation, allowing them to see their local times once they have selected their timezone on the calendar screen.

Jiffle is free for up to 10 meeting confirmations per month, after which you either have to upgrade or stop using the service! Importantly contacts don't have to subscribe to Jifflenow or install any software to schedule meetings with you.

I do have four gripes about the offering

- To send one-off meeting ad-hoc invitees is overly complex and should be simplified. Presently you need to highlight times you wish to show as available and nominate which pre-defined groups you are wishing to share this calendar information with. Hence, it appears that to arrange a one-off meeting, you either need to direct the invitees to your public version of your calendar [assuming you've made one available], or create a one-time use group for the meeting.

- Invitees can't propose alternate times via the service e.g. the following week or different times. Whilst this may encourage you to put all your free times on show, some professionals may not like to show a calendar with lots of free time, as it looks bad e.g. similar impression to seeing an empty restaurant.

- I'm not sure how easy it will be to maintain the permission "windows" if you have a large number of clients, unless you simply give them all permanent access to the calendar rather than say a month ahead. It will be too easy to exclude certain people simply because you forgot to renew/extend their access period.

- The integration with Google calendar only extends to your main calendar. Hence if your Google calendar consolidates multiple calendar subscriptions in one view, these other entries will be missing within Jifflenow. It may not affect many people, but I am one of the few!

Other than that, I like the service and can see it being very valuable to a number of professionals who offer one-on-one consultations.

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How to synchronise your calendar across devices Thursday, April 24, 2008

My calendar "infrastructure" is probably over-engineered as a consequence of being added to over time. Undoubtedly, recent offerings from Google could dramatically simplify it, which I will cover later on in this post.

Nonetheless, my system works as follows and has done so trouble-free for over 2 years.

1. Blackberry. My calendar on my blackberry is one of my entry points for appointments when I am out and about. This gets synchronised almost every night with an old version of Outlook on my old desktop at home.
2. Outlook synchronises with Airset, which acts as my online corporate and personal calendar, via a desktop application provided by Airset. Both are available at no charge.
3. Airset is my primary calendar when I am in the office, and all of my calendar entries are entered into Airset directly.

So this set-up provides a 3 way synch with Outlook. It also allows my wife to enter "family commitments" into the desktop at home, confident in the knowledge that it will be automatically included in my schedule. Similarly, she can check on my whereabouts when planning things.

In addition, I operate a 2 way synchronisation between Airset and Google Calendar. This serves three purposes.
- If Airset went offline for any reason, I can revert to Google Calendar, notwithstanding the other calendar instances I operate
- If I haven't synchronised my blackberry recently, I can check google calendar whilst on the move using my blackberry browser knowing that it will be up-to-date. Sadly Airset deem mobile access to be a premium chargeable service, but don't charge for the access to the calendar via ical and so this simply gets round their tariff [they detect you are trying to connect from a mobile device, which decent web services/sites should in order to render content appropriately, and so block access]
- Many more online services have been built to integrate with Google calendar than link to Airset.

This configuration has the disadvantage that the calendar versions can be out-of-synch for hours at a time, especially from the blackberry to the other calendar instances.

Calendar spaghetti or robust backup? Both is the honest answer. But if I were starting again, what would I do?
- Use Google calendar rather than Airset and synchronise it with Outlook using the free synchronisation application from Google
- Synchronise my blackberry with Google calendar using the free synchronisation application from Google

I would still need to link my blackberry to Outlook for my contacts information, because there is no similar facility via Google as yet................

The only thing holding me back from changing is that I prefer Airset's interface and features. But perhaps one day.

Of course, if you aren't a blackberry user but have internet access on your phone, then using Google calendar is even more compelling.
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Scrybe - great video but what about a launch Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Scrybe launched its' beta in November 2006 with great fanfare via a youtube video that simply wowed viewed with the promised sophistication of the app. I was amongst those excited by what was promised and blogged about it here and here.

Ok. It's now Feb 2008. You might think they would have opened the site up by now. But no, I'd still heard nothing after signing up for their beta.

Concerned that they'd simply opened up and not told me or I'd missed it I checked the site. As it was all those months ago. Even their last blog entry was Nov 2007 2007 saying

We are working on our biggest update to Scrybe. The beta feedback is now tapering off and I think we have most of the valuable insights we need. Some of the changes were smaller and were rolled out into earlier updates. Some of the changes require a larger effort. Right now we are focusing on the hard to do things.

Sorry. Feedback tailing off? Bored senseless beta users perhaps. Biggest update? Impossible update perhaps given that it's now Feb and 4 months have elapsed. Chaps, don't you think releasing something would be a great idea. As I suggested here, you had the early advocates in the palm of your hand with that video - why did you waste it?

If I am missing something please let me know.

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Matches at Lords 2008

In case you're a cricket fanatic like myself, I've created an ical enabled calendar of matches at Lords that you can subscribe to and thereby incorporate the match dates in your own online [google calendar, airset...] or Outlook calendars without having to rekey the information.

Simply use the ical link below http://www.airset.com/services/iCal/public/15699/TheLordsCricketCalendar2008.ics

I will endeavour to maintain it to take account of any changes to the fixture list, but always check the official Lords site for safety.

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Timetomeet still organises my life Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Whenever I am asked for availability for proposed meetings, I continue to make use of the excellent web application TimetoMeet that allows me to graphically detail times I can offer on a web calendar from which they can select or add their own suggestions if none suit. It's especially invaluable when the number of attendees is 3+.


Whilst there are many similar services now available e.g. timebridge, I've found irritations or restrictions with them that drag me back to TimetoMeet. The free service is great but the premium version has some important features worth paying for including synchronising your own ical feeds with the service. Hence I can see my existing calendar entries from within TimetoMeet when I am offering times.

Only one thing would make it better, which is something Timebridge do, namely whenever a meeting time is fixed via the service, it automatically removes this time slots from on other pending meeting invitations. i.e. you may offer several independent groups the same set of times to choose from and when a time is fixed with one group, it can no longer be available to the others.

If you have to arrange meetings with anyone, give it a try next time and see how beneficial it is in time saved.

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Timebridge finally opens up Tuesday, August 14, 2007


A long time ago I registered to trial Timebridge, an online service designed to help you find times to meet others that are mutually convenient in a single hit, rather via a series of email-exchanges.

Well, some 9 months on they've finally opened up and dumped their tight integration with Outlook that they initially planned and ran in the private beta.

Techcrunch covers the launch here.

Having registered, I'm impressed with how slick it looks but two things are irritating
1. no ical integration. Whilst most of the world probably use Outlook or Google calendars which Timebridge does support, I'm delighted to be using Airset which is ical enabled.
2. you are limited to suggesting 5 times for a meeting. That may seem a lot, but when you are suggesting an hour or two here and there, it's a painful constraint.

Both are these irritations are absent from my current service Timetomeet, which I think I shall probably be sticking with. It too is free to use. Whilst it would be easy to move, I've gotten used to the equally excellent interface they offer.

I'd agree with many who suggest that this sort of feature should be embedded within calendaring applications like Google calendar or airset, but as they are not here are some others you may care to also try

http://www.diarised.com
http://www.timetomeet.info
http://www.doodle.ch
http://www.ipolipo.com
http://tungle.com
http://www.biz-e.com

UPDATE

Yori from Timebridge kindly left a comment on this post and drew my attention to one EXCELLENT feature I hadnt spotted and which will probably swing me over to Timebridge as soon as they add ical integration, namely automatic slot management enabling you to offer the same time slots to multiple meetings/people, without fear of conflict. To repeat his illustration, suppose you are to interview 5 candidates on Monday. You can offer the same time slots to all five candidates, and the system will confirm their times automatically and cleanly. This is a big win and a feature I've asked Timetomeet about repeatedly. Without it you end up having to remember to withdraw slots from the calendar offered to people - thankfully because it's held online, you can adjust it before they accept. BUT IT IS A PAIN.

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Whosoff - the free company holiday/sick chart Sunday, July 15, 2007

Every company with a few employees or more has some sort of holiday chart to provide visibility about who's away when - sometimes these are big wall planner charts, or they can be online calendar systems.

If you are in a company with a corporate intranet, one of the first applications usually developed is a holiday request process that routes requests for authorisation plus an absence recording system.

Well, Whosoff has done exactly that but for free and on the web - site lives off ad revenues.

You enter your employee names, their holiday entitlement and any details of employees that may not be of concurrently. Identify who can authorise holidays for whom, and the system uses emails to route requests around, tracking the responses.


The site also enables sick days to be recorded and interestingly this information is transparent to most people it appears, thereby making it very evident who is always off on Monday am after a weekend away.

They've even incorporate national holiday calendars and departmental structures.

Neat idea.

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