Upcoming Products
On the product and service side, there are some neat things under development. Montreal Canadabased Tungle, has developed a peer-to-peer software client for sharing free/busy information among people you trust. "The Tungle Client integrates with Microsoft Outlook and publishes that information to other authorized Tungle users," reports Gingras. "A user can set up a meeting with the same Outlook meeting request form as today. When they add authorized Tungle users to the list of invitees, Outlook queries the current free/busy information for those users and displays it within Outlook," he explains. Users can also view free/busy time within the Tungle Client, but the mechanics of setting up a meeting are done using Outlook. While Outlook is the only calendaring tool supported today, Tungle plans to add support for other tools, including Google Calendar (by July 2007) and Apple iCal (during Fall 2007), with others predicated on customer interest.
AvailiTime is another service with a similar intent to Tungle. Calling itself the "instant messenger for availability," the AvailiTime client integrates with the user's calendars of choice, and enables the sharing of that information with other people the user trusts. It integrates with the desktop calendaring clients commonly used in business today, like Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes, as well as emerging online calendars like Salesforce.com and Google Calendar. When looking to arrange a meeting, an AvailiTime user opens their AvailiTime client and clicks on the people they want to meet with. This results in a free/busy map being calculated and displayed. Once an agreeable time is found, the user sends off a meeting invitation or email. AvailiTime is currently only available for Windows 2000, XP and Vista.
Web-based services are also available. An example is ifreebusy.com, a calendar sharing service that enables users to publish either their full calendar details or only free/busy information to trusted parties. To support this and other such services, CalConnect is developing a common and convenient way of advertising and exposing free/busy information through a free/busy URL.