How to schedule meetings and interviews easily

by Matthew Stibbe on March 19, 2008

I’ve been evaluating Timebridge and it TOTALLY RULES!

It solves a problem that I have had for a long time. Booking interviews takes a long time. You negotiate back and forth by email or phone to find a mutually convenient time. Multiply this effort by a dozen interviews a week and it really adds up to a lot of wasted time.

I’ve been looking for a piece of software that would

  • Let interviewees see my availability online
  • Allow them to book a convenient time themselves
  • Confirm the meeting using emailed meeting requests
  • Link to Microsoft Outlook 2007

At one point, I was even going to pay a software developer to write a piece of software to do it for me.

Amazingly, Timebridge does everything I wanted. It’s almost as if they read the specification I wrote. And it’s free.

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Related posts:

  1. It’s official: too many meetings make you grumpy
  2. How to have good meetings
  3. All day in meetings
  4. Unnecessary meetings cost 17 billion pounds a year
  5. Meetings vs. Work

{ 1 trackback }

Effective Collaboration
March 20, 2008 at 8:19 am

{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }

Tom March 19, 2008 at 9:49 pm

You can also try http://www.scheduleonce.com
It’s a free web 2.0 for finding a time for meetings, doesn’t require registration and have full support of time conversion across time zones and daylight saving time.
Timebridge doesn’t support full daylight saving time conversion. This can be quite problematic…

Danny March 21, 2008 at 11:36 pm

I looked at TimeBridge (last month, and I realize feature sets can change) and it didn’t meet my needs. That is: it didn’t totally rule.

What I need to do is put out an offer for a meeting and let all my people respond with their free times – then we just look at common free time to schedule the meeting. TimeBridge (and all but one of the other programs in this space) didn’t do that.

The only program I found that did that was AgreeDate.

[Note, I am not associated with AgreeDate and am not pushing it as part of a marketing effort. I simply tried it and I liked it.]

My students (I teach a graduate course in collaboration technology) looked at several products in this space; they came to the same conclusion.

Matthew Stibbe March 22, 2008 at 8:57 am

If anyone is looking for the site Danny mentioned it is http://www.agreeadate.com. I’m going to check it out now.

Tom March 23, 2008 at 3:01 pm

Danny – Try ScheduleOnce – it does just that, and faster

Mat March 24, 2008 at 7:45 pm

Makes you wonder why Microsoft can’t get something like this linked into Outlook. Seems like Outlook got 50% of the way there then just sto…..

Andy Bosselman April 10, 2008 at 4:35 am

I can’t believe this functionality isn’t already native to Outlook, Apple iCal and every other calendar application out there. Timebridge looks like a great app, I only wish it worked with iCal. But perhaps we can hope for all of our calendars to start talking to each other someday soon?

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