When Is Good: the Holy Grail of casual meeting scheduling
Thanks to the folks at Calendar Swamp, I came across something I’ve been searching for (and resigning myself to write someday) for a great long while:
Background
Before I extoll its virtues, a little back story. We have a crusty old Perl/CGI app at work that a student worker wrote for us many moons ago. While it still serves its purpose, it has several flaws:
- It requires the organizer to install a full copy of the source code in public web space, which must have Perl/CGI capabilities.
- There is no update mechanism, which stinks given the number of copies floating around.
- The UI was current circa 1998.
- If it breaks, we can *probably* fix it.
- There is no way to clean up old scheduling requests short of connecting via SSH and breaking out good, old-fashioned “rm”. [Note: I LOVE the command line myself, but it's a black box to most users]
I’ve always kept my eyes out for a replacement, but all the flaws aside, it solves one problem area extremely well: It lets a disparate group of people with no central shared calendaring system throw their available times for a given week at it and lets the organizer find the time that is most suitable for most (if not all) attendees. Beyond that, it’s dirt simple to use–just click the square once for “OK” and it turns green, click again for “Not OK” and it turns red. The organizer gets a summary page with a smiley icon on all good times and red or green blocks scaled by their relative “goodness” or “badness”.
I’ve looked at several others (Diarised, Doodle, and newest on the block, TimeBridge), but they are all overly-constrained, usually in the sense that you must propose specific dates/times, rather than collect a broad sample of who’s available when and look at your options.
Enter When Is Good
This is the first app I’ve seen that really matches what we have in house, but in a modern way. (Not to mention that we don’t have to maintain it.) It honors the spirit of simplicity and doesn’t put the onus on the organizer to pick some target times out of thin air.
Here are the things I like most about it:
- Can click & drag over several cells
- No sign up is required by anyone
- It has a lot of extra options, but they are hidden by default (button at bottom left)
- The company has a paid service option, which should help keep the basic service free. Can’t live off VC angels forever, can we?
- Simple and uncluttered
- Time zone support (used ours with multiple time zones–quite painful)
- You can make your availability query as big (several weeks) or as small (a single day) as you like
- 15, 30, and 60 minute time block options (day option too)
- Supports “generic” days like our in-house system (no dates shown–set under options)
So far, I haven’t found any way in which this doesn’t match what we have feature for feature and make it better. Best of all, I don’t every have to get around to writing it! 
UPDDATE
So WIG has fared less-favorably in the wild. Here are some points of improvement:
- Since coming up with the Free/Pro scales, they seem to have removed the ability to modify the blocks/intervals of time. That is less than ideal.
- People are reporting that they can’t edit times after the fact, nor can reporters see the results–only the organizer.
I should mention that I looked at Meet-O-Matic (http://beta.meetomatic.com), which was also mentioned in the Calendar Swamp post, but found the UI counter-intuitive and cluttered.
Wow! This is beyond awesome…I really like that you can set to receive email alerts when there is a response. It is very easy, and no accounts to sign up for. What a find!!!
I’m working with both Tungle and WhenIsGood, finding some interesting things.
WhenIsGood: process of scheduling a 8-person meeting highlighted the apparent inability to get back into one’s schedule to *edit* once the schedule is submitted — the feedback mentioned above.
That’s the reason I turned to Tungle, which appears very slick and powerful.
You and others are each able to create individual accounts, which acan then be set up to “sync” with your “regular” calendar (zimbra, google, ical, etc — may require installation of local client/’conduit’).
When you set up an event and send invites to the appropriate individuals, Tungle is supposed to draw from the info on everyone’s individual calendar to create a sort of “master schedule” where all the other schedules are overlaid on yours, making it easy to identify individuals as well as commonly free times.’ Basically what Zimbra already does on campus for all its users, except that it can also pull in other calendars as well.
I was unsure how well this would go over with faculty, however. Walking them through setting things up to sync with their person calendars — especially considering some faculty don’t *keep* thorough (digital) personal calendars, so we’d have to go through the different choices with them, help them do that part, etc. There may be a way to just enter time blocks right in the website, but I haven’t yet investigated closely enough.
Because it just seemed so much simpler, I decided to take one last closer look at WhenIsGood. — very good decision I think. Looking more closely at the setup, it *is* possible to edit existing schedule entries — user just need to note the URL displayed on the “Thank You” page just after submitting the first time. That URL can be used to get *back* to the original entry and edit.
Also, if the users are willing to sign up for (free) accounts, there are more options that make things even easier. If you log in, the site will keep track of events for which you’ve entered schedule info, and you’ll see a simple list of those events, with links to follow if you wish to edit your submissions — very nice.
I also appreciate the ability to choose 30-min blocks vs 60, and also the ability to display a schedule (a day, week, multiple weeks, whatever you set up) *without* visible dates –so you can work with more of a “generic” or “typical” week’s schedule. One feature I’d like to see is the ability of all participants to be able to see the compilation of schedules — the outcome of everyone’s entries for a specific event. This may be available now, haven’t tested yet. I may come back to Tungle — it definitely has its place — but I’ll continue working w/ WIG for the moment.