Calendaring: Are We There Yet?

Related Articles

• What is the Impact of Enterprise 2.0 on the CIO
• IBM Comes Out Swinging
• The Four Habits of an Effective Collaborative Individual

Subscription Options

Subscribe Magazine

Subscribe Newswire

Widgets & RSS Feeds

Two years ago Messaging News ran a cover story on calendaring, asking “Why isn’t it just like email?” We weren’t referring to the penchant for spam and information overload in email, nor the inability to find anything (“Where did I file that message?”), but rather email’s ubiquity. If you have an email account, you can email me, as well as anyone else with an email account. But to use your electronic calendar in conjunction with other people, well that’s a totally different scenario. This article looks back over the past two years since our cover story on calendaring, and asks if it’s gotten any better. Unfortunately, I find myself sounding like the very perturbed Shrek character giving the standard answer of “No, Donkey” to Donkey’s “Are we there yet?” question during the journey in Shrek 2.

Where exactly is “there”? “There” is the nirvana of calendaring, whereby you can set up a meeting with anyone, viewing their free-busy time within the context of your standard calendaring client. It’s seamless—it works across Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, Google Calendar, Meeting Maker, Apple iCal, and other systems. It’s automatic—the free-busy information shows anytime you enter their name, adding them to an upcoming meeting. Basically, it just works. “There” also means that when your organization starts using collaborative places for team projects, the associated meetings auto-populate into your calendar, and actually mean something when a free-busy search is done. That’s not the case today, even for products from the big vendors, e.g., meetings in Microsoft SharePoint don’t do anything beyond looking pretty if you add them to Outlook through a manual step. And finally, “there” means that mobile devices are full first-class citizens—you can carry around all of your meetings, and you can initiate meeting scheduling from your mobile device of choice.

Coming back to Shrek, we’re not there yet. But some progress has been made in the past two years, and in the remainder of this article, I’ll look at increased maturity of online meeting scheduling services.

Some Bright Lights on the Way to “There”

In June 2007 I mentioned a range of services tackling the calendaring challenge. Some of those have exited the market in the intervening years—Ikordo, AvailiTime.com, and the Calimanjaro calendaring client. Others that I mentioned—TimeBridge and Tungle—along with some that I didn’t, have continued to build out their capabilities and extend the value and reach of their offerings. While there are subtle differences between how the specific services work, TimeBridge, Tungle and Doodle all permit individuals to discover free-busy meeting times with anyone across the world, and automatically or with some manual intervention, set up a meeting. TimeBridge and Tungle have clean integrations with calendaring clients, for both synchronization of meeting events between the user’s primary calendar and the Web service, and for setting up meetings with others.

Both TimeBridge and Tungle provide a browser-based way of setting up a meeting with other people, along with some additional smarts. When setting a meeting, you enter the meeting details like topic and location, the list of invitees, and select possible meeting times from a calendar. If you have installed the add-on from either vendor, your local calendar is synchronized with the respective service, meaning that when you choose meeting times, you don’t inadventently choose a time that’s already booked. Once you have the framework of the proposed meeting set, you send it off to the invitees. With TimeBridge, the invitees repond whether they can come at each particular time, if they can’t come, or that a particular slot is the best time. Each invitee gets to see all proposed meeting slots, even if some invitees can’t come at a particular time. TimeBridge then selects the best alternative, and sets the meeting. With Tungle, a similar process happens, although its algorithm is slightly different. As soon as one invitee says they can’t come at a particular time, all subsequent invitees do not see that meeting slot as an option. So while the ethos of TimeBridge allows for the reality that not everyone may be able to attend a meeting, Tungle forces the issue and either confirms the meeting with everyone, or deadlocks it. Both services are free, so the barrier to adoption and use is very low.

But We Still Have a Problem: User Adoption

We still appear to have a problem and basically it’s one of widespread adoption of these newer tools. Recent research commissioned by Doodle, an online service that can be used for discovering meeting availabilities, found that managers and administrative professionals spend almost five hours a week to arrange seven meetings, with each meeting having four-to-five attendees. That doesn’t include the time spent at the meeting, just the time getting the meeting set up! How can this be you ask? There’s phone tag. Or there’s a plethora of emails to find out when others are available, and all of the “reply-to-all’s” to make sense of. Or there’s the use of the free-busy capability in in-house calendaring systems, but that only works if everyone keeps their calendar up-to-date and everyone at the company is on a unified calendaring system. But as we said in the article two years ago, meeting availability is more than a free-busy lookup. It might set the stage, but the actors still have to be willing to come out and perform. Doodle’s point, however, is that by using an online meeting scheduling service like its own—or TimeBridge or Tungle—the time involved is drastically reduced.

No, We’re Not There Yet, But We’re Closer

Donkey’s insistence on knowing if they were “there yet” gave Shrek a binary choice for answering: yes or no. There was no room for “almost” or “we’re closer” or “enjoy the view from this vantage point”. We don’t have the same mental shackles of Shrek or Donkey, so let’s be realistic and admit that we are closer than we were two years ago. Regardless of whether you use TimeBridge, Tungle, or Doodle, we all have a much better approach available for scheduling meetings, and when you dig into TimeBridge and Tungle in particular, the nuances are pretty good. My vote is that it’s “good enough” now, and while “there” will be spectular, I’m not going to waste my breath insisting on a binary answer.