Is Free/Busy Enough?
There are some who argue that basing availability for meetings on free/busy time misses the point. "People don't keep their calendars up-to-date," says Jim Cook, the CEO of UK-based Volutio Limited. "Therefore we must recognize that a blank spot in someone's calendar doesn't automatically mean that they are available to meet." Yori Nelken, the CEO of San Francisco-based startup TimeBridge, adds unreliability and impoliteness to the litany of issues with free/busy. "People often block out significant chunks of time in their calendar so they can get work done without being interrupted with meeting requests," states Nelken. "This results in a lot of potential busy time that is really just 'soft' commitments that can pretty easily be changed." Both Cook and Nelken's companies seek to address the social aspects of meeting scheduling.
Volutio is about to release the first version of Ikordo, a meeting scheduling service. Here's how it works. An Ikordo subscriber visits their Ikordo meeting scheduling Web page and provides meeting parameters, such as what the meeting is about, who they want to attend, where it's being held, and so on. The Ikordo service then sends out email messages to all invited participants asking them to respond with their availability to meet at the suggested time. Replies are sent to the Ikordo service, which applies natural language processing to parse the reply and figure out whether the person is able to attend. The service continues the process of negotiation on behalf of the meeting organizer until a quorum of attendees can attend. If one or two people are deadlocking the meeting, Ikordo will proactively send a politely worded email asking them if they might change their schedule to enable the meeting to take place. "We aren't asking people to change their behavior in any way. Since it is email-based, rather than Webbased, it works anywhere and everywhere that people get email today, including mobile devices," notes Cook. While Ikordo isn't based on free/busy lookups, users can choose to upload their current free/busy information into Ikordo to assist with meeting scheduling. TimeBridge is also gearing up to release the first public version of its meeting scheduling service, which it calls a personal scheduling manager. The service adds functionality to the users existing calendaring tool of choice (e.g., Outlook). An additional "New Meeting" button in Outlook enables a user to create a TimeBridge meeting proposal.
Users have instant access and visibility into their Outlook calendar (for free/busy time) and address book (for invitees). They can choose up to five proposed meeting times, viewing both their own availability and the free/busy information for anyone on their Exchange Server or their TimeBridge network. Once the meeting proposal is sent, the organizer's calendar is ghosted with the five tentative meeting times, so they don't need to keep track of what they proposed. Recipients of the invitation can share which times work best for them. Importantly, the respondent can see how other invitees have responded. This creates subtle social pressure to answer affirmatively and increases the chance of finding a time that works for everyone. The TimeBridge service reconciles the responses, and sends out a confirmed meeting time for the best available slot. Once confirmed, all tentative times are removed from the organizers' calendar. TimeBridge reports that 80 percent of the time all of this happens automatically, but when conflicts arise the organizer is supplied with a set of tools to resolve any deadlocks. The service will work with Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar and Apple iCal by the end of 2007, with additional calendar support forthcoming based on customer demand. Invitees require nothing but a browser and an Internet connection to respond to an invitation.
Oren Sreenby, the executive director of Emerging Technology at the University of Washington in Seattle, and a member of the CalConnect Steering Committee, remains unconvinced. "There's a lot of communication that flows around calendaring, and prioritizing where you spend your time," he says. "I am unsure as to the degree to which you can formalize all of that negotiation in software." CalConnect isn't blind to the nuances of free/busy time vs. meeting availability either. Its vAvailability ad hoc group investigated how to portray different types of availability to different classes or groups of people. "Think of a University professor," explains Thewlis. "They will have an availability for meeting with their faculty colleagues, a different availability for meeting with students, and a different availability for meeting with the academic provost. How we translate these different availabilities into software rules and representations is a matter of current and future interest." The vAvailability work has been submitted to the IETF as an extension to the revised iCalendar standard.