Tungle - Meetings made easy [well at least scheduling them]

If you work in a company that has some type of meeting scheduling capability and you meet predominantly with other people in that company, then Tungle is not for you. If on the other hand you are like me, setting up meetings with people from lots of different companies, then Tungle is a wonderful tool. Tungle has a plug-in for Outlook and works with Google Calendars to tap into your current appointments and availability. The magic in Tungle is that it stops the email string of, "when is each of you available?" and the back and forth that always seems to follow.

For example, I have an email suggesting a meeting with a partner and two other companies early next week. With the email selected I simply click on the Tungle button in Outlook and my Tungle page opens in my browser already populated with the email addresses from the original message. The Tungle page has my calendar with all my appointments. I simply add some info about the meeting, in this case a one hour conference call. I can how select windows of time that are available on my calendar. Then I send the Tungle invite. One nice thing is that my invitees do not need to sign-up for Tungle to respond for my meeting. They receive an email with a link to the meeting invite page and they select from the available times. The great news is that it is always up to date with the respondents availability so what you see is what is available based on everyone who has responded so far. If an invitee finds there are no available times that work they indicate that and the process begins again. Once the time is nailed down I can send the meeting notice with the details.

There is also a "Meet with me" capability that provides a personal link for someone to access to schedule a meeting with you. It shows your "busy" versus "available time based on your settings. I haven't found a need for this capability.

I use a Blackberry and can respond by opening the link but I would love to see a native app. Tungle is a free app that I highly recommend giving a try.