The meeting time broker TimeDriver, which has been in closed testing since I covered it back in January, will finally enter its public beta period on Monday. I had a chance to play with the product Thursday. For a lot of people, this service could be a great help.
TimeDriver is designed to help people who need to schedule a lot of one-on-one meetings. If you're interviewing job candidates, for example, or taking appointments with customers, you can set up either one-time or recurring blocks of time, and send people links that let them grab appointment times in those blocks that remain unclaimed.
You can also just put a link on your Web page or in your e-mails and take appointments from anyone. Yikes.
My time is yours. Live demo. Try it.
TimeDriver can link to Google or Outlook calendars if you want to make sure you're not booking appointments on top of your one-off meetings, and the system will then write appointments back into your calendar when people claim times. There are advanced options that can prevent people from scheduling last-minute meetings or from seeing more than a few time slots; you wouldn't want to look unbusy, would you? But there's no way to automatically enforce buffer times between meetings, which might matter if you make house calls.
The service has tools to send out blast e-mails to people (for example, job candidates you want to interview) and will track all their responses. Coming soon is a new Outlook plug-in that will let you send meeting requests from within your Outlook client itself; in the current version you can only manage mass meeting invitations from within TimeDriver.
My weekly demo timeslots.
TimeDriver is a different beast than a meeting negotiation product like TimeBridge, which allows for multi-person meetings and encourages a form of voting on best times to meet. That kind of solution is better for people like me who treat each meeting separately; TimeDriver is better for people who see one meeting as much like the next.
The basic TimeDriver service is free. Paid and enterprise versions will get additional features, such as calendar pooling--so multiple people can service appointment requests--analytics tools, and custom branding options.
Future versions may include variable privacy, so specific people or groups can see more detail of your calendar, or so some users need confirmation from you before a meeting is booked, but others don't.
I look forward to seeing this tool integrated into other online customer management solutions, like Salesforce.com. Or better yet, adopted by my dentist.
See also: Timebridge (review), Jiffle (formerly iPolipo; review), ScheduleOnce (review).
Tungle, launching today, may be the meeting coordination utility to beat. Like TimeBridge, Jiffle, and other products in this new category, it lets you block off a bunch of times for a meeting you want to have with a person or group of people, and then it handles all the back-and-forth while your attendees figure out which of the available times they want to grab. Once the meeting is booked, it enters the appointment into your Outlook calendar and sends the recipients calendar entries, too.
Tungle's success is in its design. If you're setting up a meeting, you can select whole swaths of potential times, even if you just want the person on the other end to pick a 30 minute slot. You can also do cool things such as drag blocks across days (for example, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Wednesday through Friday) for open times. Tungle will excise times that you've already got booked (including times booked by other attendees on your Exchange server), and will make sure that your contact never gets the option to select times that are taken, even if they're scheduled after you send out the initial meeting request.
Tungle lets you create big blocks of potential times for meetings, but it won't double-book you.
Another unique feature: The capability to schedule two people into a meeting but not yourself--great for administrators. And you still get a confirmation when the meeting is set up.
When a meeting is finally locked in, the person or people you've scheduled get confirmation e-mails, and in the e-mails come calendar entries that auto-populate Outlook, Google Calendar, Entourage, and other scheduling systems.
Tungle lets you give some of your contacts access to your free/busy information so they can more easily initiate a meeting request with you. For people you'd rather keep at a more professional distance, you don't have to share anything about your schedule except episodically, when you want to set up a meeting with them.
It appears easy to use and mostly straightforward. I'm looking forward to giving it a shot. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the desktop application to run on my system. Outlook is a "finicky platform" Tungle CEO Marc Gingras told me before I fired up the demo on my own PC. Prophetic words. My cursed laptop also rejects TimeBridge, by the way. I don't know what it is that keeps scheduling helpers from running well on my computers.
For people setting up meetings, Tungle is Outlook-only so far. But as I said, it sends confirmation e-mails to attendees that many calendar applications can read.
Tungle is free. Premium services (such as scheduling meeting rooms) will be available eventually. The company also plans to make money by linking to third parties such as conference bridges.
Once we can get these applications stable on a PC, we'll compare them.
The meeting time negotiation service TimeBridge is adding a new Web-based component today. It now lets you set up a page, which TimeBridge hosts, that displays your free times. People who want a piece of your schedule can request an available time from those that are open. It's a good improvement to TimeBridge for service providers like consultants.
Previously, all of TimeBridge's scheduling communications were in e-mails. See review: TimeBridge makes scheduling easy.
Now anyone can see what a slacker you are.
As before, TimeBridge gets its free/busy data from your Outlook or Google calendar; if you're a user of one of these products, you don't need to adopt a new basic scheduling system to use the TimeBridge meeting negotiation service.
It doesn't look like the new hosted schedule is embeddable in Web pages or on social network sites as a widget, though. If I was a consultant using TimeBridge to let my customers book time with me, I would prefer it if they didn't have to leave my site to do so.
I've used TimeBridge on and off since November 2006, and I've found that the plug-in for Outlook has a conflict with the McAfee virus scanner that CNET installs on our machines. But the service is so potentially valuable to me that I've tried three different versions of the software hoping it'd be fixed.
Previously, TimeBridge added a free conference calling service, a nice and natural add-on to a meeting coordination product.
See also: Timedriver, Jiffle (formerly iPolipo; review), ScheduleOnce (review), and Ether (review).
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