Posts Tagged ‘Time Management’

Herding Cats, Part 2

January 20 2010

We promised feedback after week of trying out three similar mtg/event scheduling tools. To recap, we are playing around with Presdo, Tungle and TimeBridge. For our purposes TimeBridge came out on top. IĀ encourage you to run out and try each of these apps and feel free to come back here with comments.

TimeBridge

Pro: Scheduling meetings with several busy people without haggling is our biggest pain point. Problem solved. The user interface was straight forward. Trial account left open the possibility of a cross sell to other features. (We are entrepreneurs, too. Nice to see good pricing strategy.)

Con: Sharing calendars left users confused. Most found it difficult to find the colleagues shared calendar. In the end, that’s not very useful as it makes better sense to send an invite out that fills holes in your own calendar.

Presdo

Pro: Easy to use. Super easy. That bulldog that rides a skateboard could use it. Sign up is easy, so it took no time at all to get going.

Con: Not sure how this trumps iCal or Outlook when scheduling events for your calendar. It seems like an extra step, though I understand the argument for Presdo meeting reminders in advance, which is better than most calendar apps. No collaborative scheduling. Outbound only scheduling, which make it more like a nice scheduling to-do list.

Tungle

Pro: Handles collaborative scheduling with ease. Remember, that’s our biggest pain point. UI is intuitive once you get past the early handholding. Seems this app was intended for perhaps a less web-savvy users–Wall Street v. One Dell Way. Short URL can be copy and pasted into your own email client quickly and easily. That’s an interesting feature for contacts not interested in third-party mail, or leerily of it.

Con: Some of the sharing UI is tough to navigate. It’s just me, but loads of white and purple on the page make navigation visually distracting.

Conclusion

It’s a tie (for now). We’ll continue to run Tungle against TimeBridge and vice versa until we settle on an app. Time to kick the tires when it matters–with clients. Sorry, Presdo. Nifty little app, but didn’t have enough muscle as a business tool.

Tungle
Tagline: Scheduling made easy

TimeBridge
Tagline: Run great meetings

Presdo
Tagline: Make time to “___”.

Bookmark and Share

Herding Cats Ain’t Easy

January 12 2010

A little experiment is underway here at the VLG offices. While we haven’t subjected our clients to it yet, there is a serious need to streamline the entire process of scheduling meetings. We’re evaluating the following apps. Let you know who comes out on top. Are you using these or others? Comment below.

To save time I’m going to copy and paste the elevator pitch for each below.

TimeBridge

TimeBridge’s one-step scheduling allows users to quickly determine the best time to meet, establish meeting-centric trust networks and automatically provision an online shared meeting space. You select participants and send alternative meeting times. TimeBridge collects everyone’s availability, quickly finds and confirms the best time, creates an online space for documents and comments, and updates your calendar.

Presdo

Presdo takes the hassle out of trying to find the best time to get together with people. Use Presdo to minimize the annoying ping pong of email, texting, and voicemail when organizing the next team lunch or trying to grab coffee with a friend.

Tungle

Tungle reduces the amount of communication ordinarily needed to schedule meetings, by allowing users to view the availability of their contacts before sending them an invitation. The best part about Tungle is that users can share their calendars with ANYONE.

Back in a week to tell you what we found.

Bookmark and Share