This utility is ideal for those of you who want an easy, free solution to the age old problem of scheduling a meeting. I have used this application a couple of times and it works a treat.
Here is what Meet-O-Matic says about itself.
If you’ve spent time scheduling or arranging meetings, you will know that the task typically involves some tricky moments trying to satisfy everyone’s constraints and to converge on a schedule that works. Often you end up playing ‘telephone tag’ or ‘email tag’ trying to chase individuals. Even if you use modern diary/meeting management workgroup or scheduling software, things can still become unstuck if one or two individuals don’t use the meeting scheduling software properly (or don’t use such scheduling software at all). Our research into human computer interaction, psychology and intelligent agents has suggested six fundamental principles underlying the creation of good diary management/meeting scheduling software:
- Autonomy: People often prefer to ‘do their own thing’ (e.g. arrange circumstances to attend or avoid a specific meeting), rather than delegating responsibility to another person or a software tool.
- Different tools: You cannot count on everyone you intend to invite to a meeting to use the same single diary/meeting software, or even software that ‘interoperates’ (communicates seamlessly) with your own.
- Least common denominator: You can, however, safely assume that the overwhelming majority of people you want to invite probably have access to Internet email and a web browser.
- Familiarity: People like to work with software tools they already know.
- Speed: People will often pick up the phone or send a conventional email rather than wait for a new software tool to help them, even if that tool looks innovative and promising. Reason? The old tried-and-tested methods feel faster!
- Granularity: For meetings that involve many possible dates or many people, the real problem is homing in on dates or AM/PM slots at a coarse-grained level in order to obtain a first-pass solution, rather than fussing about the precise time.
Give it a try, you will be pleased with the results.
Filed under: Meeting Scheduler | Tagged: Easy, Free, Meetings, Scheduler
