Scheduling Widgets

Just did a briefing with Marc Gringas, the CEO at Tungle.  I wrote about them in my third book "Collaboration 2.0" and this is a bit of an update

TungleMe - this new widget is live on the Tungle site and should be available to you in a few weeks.  Collaborative Strategies plans to add the widget to our web site so you can schedule a meeting with any of our analysts without having to do the e-mail shuffle (back and forth to schedule the meeting).  Now I can just point them to my site, they can it a "shedule a meeting with David" button and see my free/busy calendar.

Tungle spent all of 2009 re-doing their application and moving from P2P to a client-server achitecture.  They have also made it easier and more robust. Currently all of their tools are free, but that will not last forever...

You can find more of my blogs at www.collaborate.com

David Coleman, Founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies, has been involved with groupware, collaborative technologies, and knowledge management since 1989. He is a frequent public speaker, an industry analyst, and author of books and magazine articles on electronic collaboration and knowledge management. David can be reached by e-mail at: davidc@collaborate.com. Follow David on Twitter.

Comments

[Steve Lamont]

This is an interesting tool that helps address an organization's cultural sensitivity to different locations and different timezones. This is especially important when groups must collaborate across broad geographies and multiple time zones.
Recall the number of times we have seen an email where someone, in an attempt to collaborate, says: "Let's meet at 8. call me at 555-1212." This is an extreme example, but too often people fail to (1) specify am/pm, (2) state which time zone they mean (yours or mine), and (3) provide country codes, area codes, or numbers (i.e., non 800 numbers) that are valid outside the country.
In my experience, in the best collaboration cultures (Intel comes to mind), most all employees can do the time zone math in their heads, so they know the best times to pick for an international conference call. And in all my dealings with such companies, the leader specified the meeting time clearly for all participants, often stating the time in each of the relevant time zones.
Pop Quiz: What is a respectable time to have a conference call with someone in Korea? What is a good web site for you to check?