No matter what size business you own, or where you work, there will come a time when you will need to host a meeting. And trying to coordinate the busy schedules of attendees can be exasperating. Whether it’s 3 people or 25, the challenge is the same. When is everyone available? There are plenty of online meeting schedulers that promise to make this task easier. I have tried many of them, and have determined that these features are critical:
- Ability to sync with your online calendar (Google, Outlook, whatever) so that you can start with when you are available
- Enables you to select at least 5 choices.
- Sends emails to attendees inviting them to the meeting
- Allows all invitees see availability of each other
- Reserves the meeting times selected on your calendar until the meeting is finalized to avoid double-booking
- Saves data and allows you to update
- Sends reminders with updates so you remember to follow-up
- Conference call integration
There are many more features that could be added for your specific needs, but I feel that the above are the minimum. I used other services to schedule some meetings and they:
- Did not allow me to see my own availability, which made scheduling difficult.
- Did not reserve the dates to prevent double booking
- Did not send reminders that meeting had not been scheduled
- Most importantly, did not allow attendees to see other’s availability.
Why would seeing other’s availability be important? I don’t know. But when I switched to my current application, it provided this feature. And I was amazed at what I discovered. In the original application, attendees could not see each other’s availability, and they each selected one when they were available for a meeting. In the new application, multiple times were selected. A broader level of collaboration? I’m not sure, but this has become an important feature for me.
So what application did I finally select? Timebridge (http://timebridge.com/). It offers a free option, with a premium option that offers more features.
What program do you use? Thoughts?
