From the “Not Linux or Open Source, but good to know” department comes this little screed on trying to meet with people for important meetings in multiple timezones, organizations and calendaring programs.

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Scenario:  Try to schedule users for a meeting who are in a) Provo b) Waltham c) Nurenberg d) France.  Mix includes 3 companies, 4 operating system choices and 3 calendaring programs/standards.  Wackiness ensues, as they say in the sitcom biz.

Enter meeting organizers such as  When is Good, ScheduleOnce, Doodle and TimeBridge.  The basic premise is that you go to the scheduling software site and create a meeting and paint or select your available times, and then the site sends you the meeting URL so you can have all the other people select from the times you propose.

For example, if you click on this meeting request, you’ll see I have proposed a set of times over a week, and it’s possible to click your available times and have it sent back to me so I can see everyone’s availability.   Larry and Abigail both clicked their availability and this is the result.

While When is Good doesn’t yet support increments of 15 or 30m or less than an hour, it’s been very useful in getting a general idea of when everyone is able to meet up.  I use it over the others (ScheduleOnce knocked WhenIsGood out of the saddle, but it’s still very useful) because I like the interface, I don’t have to register and it will send Blackberry users an html interface, rather than just not working for them.  If you need a more complete and incremental interface, I highly recommend ScheduleOnce or TimeBridge.

Got a fave scheduling tool?  Let me know about it and I’ll be happy to post it and give you props.

(Props indeed to Yael for suggesting ScheduleOnce, it’s very well done and I’m using it already to schedule those thorny meeting times.)

Enjoy,

RossB

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