TimeBridge: Scheduling Made Easy
TimeBridge, an online calendar mashup that wants to take the pain out of scheduling meetings and coordinating calendars across multiple providers, has announced it’s dropping its beta status and opening up to the public.
Most of us set up meetings by sending out a mass e-mail to all the people we’d like to see attend and then wait for the replies to trickle in so we can find the best time. Subscribing to each other’s calendars helps, but if your company uses Outlook and you want to meet with someone from another company that uses something else, things can get complex pretty quick. TimeBridge wants to help you streamline that scenario.
Although TimeBridge began life mainly as an Outlook plug-in, it has since developed the web interface which came out of beta earlier this week. There is still a plug-in available if you’re looking for deep integration with Outlook, but all the features can also be had through the web interface.
TimeBridge can import data and integrate with your existing Outlook calendar through the plug-in or you can import data from Google Calendar, so it’s fairly simple to get up and running, just import your calendar, select a few days/times that work for you and send out your invite. TimeBridge can even integrate with your Outlook contacts list and offer auto-completion to speed up the process of sending out invites.
Your invite recipients will get a link to your calendar and they can look at your available times and select the ones that work for them. After everyone has responded, TimeBridge looks for a common overlap point and schedules a meeting accordingly.
Should there be no time when everyone is free, Timebridge will e-mail you to suggest that you provide alternate days or times.
Unfortunately TimeBridge lacks support for other popular calendar services like Yahoo Calendars and Windows Live Hotmail Calendars and there’s no way to specify required participants or prioritize your invites the way other services we’ve looked at can (see our review of MyPunchBowl).
Still despite a few shortcomings, TimeBridge makes scheduling a meeting much easier than the clumsy process most people use now — sending out a mass e-mail and praying everyone responds.
Here’s a video of TimeBridge in action:
