Lately, I have come to despise scheduling meetings via email- it’s especially challenging to do so with multiple attendees. Some of the annoyances include confusion about time zone, multiple emails going back and forth, having to gather all of the info, and it never fails that none of the times proposed work for the last participant to respond… If you have the pleasure of using an Exchange Server, than this is probably not a primary source of email clutter for you due to the enhanced availability view it provides. But for the rest of us, no matter how organized you are scheduling meetings via email are a real pain in the @#$!

I have been using services like Doodle.com or Moreganize.com. They definitely made the process less painful by allowing you to enter proposed days and times to forward to invitees. I still had challenges where attendees were in different time zones, flipping back and forth between my calendar and the browser, and entering each time range (i.e. 10am, 10:30am). The process was still too cumbersome and too many keystrokes for me.

I recently came across a service from Tungle.com on the TechCrunch blog. At a first glance, here is what I like about Tungle:

It provides the ability to sync my schedule and select my available times with a click. Plus, ease of correction via the erase feature, too!

Invitees don’t have to sign up for anything to use the service.

Tungle is smart enough to allow only one selection if scheduling a meeting between two people.  This prevents the additional back and forth to actually agree and confirm a time.

Not only does Tungle sync with your Outlook calendar but it will sync contacts and calendars with Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal and Entourage.

It’s quick and easy to get up and running. First, you will need to create an account. Next, you can choose to sync your calendar and/or contacts. This is optional but it certainly will make the process more seamless. Now you are ready to schedule by clicking on the “Schedule a meeting” button. And if you install the Outlook Connector, Mac Connector or Google Quick Links plugin for Firefox these will provide you with additional features and scheduling convenience. Check out this brief video I recorded on how to schedule a meeting using Tungle.com.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 3:51 pm and is filed under @ Home, Email Overload, Organize your Bytes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.