Scheduling 101: A Few New Developments

While we continue to wait for the ideal academic scheduling app to appear, I thought I’d draw your attention to a few new developments among previously mentioned calendar and scheduling web services. ‘Twould appear that we all benefit when a variety of different developers compete to capture the market for automatic, integrated, sychronizing, multi-device scheduling services. Of course, if you’re perfectly happy with your pencil-and-paper calendar system then you might as well stop reading this post. The rest of you, however, can come with me…

First, if you remember the discussion following my post covering Tungle, then you might remember that one of the drawbacks was the inability to schedule appointments for fewer than 30 minutes. Well, Tungle has just announced that they now allow 15-minute appointments. So there.

Second, Google just announced a new feature for their calendar: “Smart Rescheduler.” Apparently, if you and a group of others have all shared Google Calendars, you can find a good time to meet by “clicking on a link.” I haven’t tried it, but it sounds a lot like what you can do with Doodle (as I’ve written before), only it requires everyone to have a Google Calendar account.

“Not so fast!” Doodle responds: “Don’t confuse Google rescheduler with Doodle.” And this brings me to item number three, which is the announcement of better integration of Doodle with Google Calendar. Provided you’re signed in to both services, Doodle will now check your Google Calendar in order to suggest how to respond when you’re asked to share your available times via Doodle, will allow you to tentatively add appointments to your calendar from the Doodle interface, and will automatically schedule the resulting appointment when the best time has been decided upon. Nice!

Have any scheduling or calendar suggestions that haven’t been covered or mentioned before? Let us hear from you in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user ghewgill.]