The only thing worse than company meetings is trying to schedule one. The more people who need to be at that meeting, the harder it is to find a time slot that works with everyone’s schedule. A new Google Calendar Labs feature called the Smart Rescheduler brings some search smarts to the problem. “Overnight, all the Google apps customers will get this,” says Google Calendar product manager Cyrus Mistry. “It is like we are giving every employee their own administrative assistant.”
The person scheduling the meeting enters the names of the participants, how long the meeting will be, and a date by when the meeting must take place. The Smart Rescheduler then goes out and looks at everyone’s calendar to see when everyone is free, taking into account different time zones and other commitments on their calendars (in order for this to work, all the meeting attendees must share their calendars with Google Calendar).
All too often at this point in the process, someone has a conflict. What the Rescheduler does is look at all the soft constraints and actually ranks the best meeting times. Different attendees can be prioritized so the meeting is set around their schedule. Soft constraints are taken into account like partial schedule overlaps, times blocked with no other attendees, meetings where someone’s been invited but hasn’t yet accepted, or meetings organized by that person. These factors often indicate a schedule that can be altered.
Google Calendar throws all of these factors together and comes up with a ranking for the best possible meeting time. “We did look at algorithms for search to see how they solved which doc should come to the top,” says Mistry. “We discover what meeting should come out on top.” The Rescheduler can even book new conference rooms based on which one is closest to the original one and the same size.
And that is actually a feature many if not all groupware solutions can do for how many years? Yeah, right.
Ok, this just plain rocks! Excellent feature.
Google was second to market with this. http://www.skedwool.com was first. But of course, Google will win the war….
Microsoft has had this feature in their systems for years. If Google created a wheel tomorrow, they’d be stories about it just b/c they are Google. Hey – great company when it comes to search but my necks getting a little stiff from looking up at the pedestal.
problem is trying to schedule meetings with people not using Google Calendar. It would rock if it talked to exchange….
Also seems like timebridge.com
Outlook has had this for 3 or 4 years. Another example of Google copying something and making a big deal about it…
Also worth looking at tungle.me Does this sort of thing but cross calendar platforms.
Why is this postworthy? This is already possible in so many ways, not least of which is Exchange and Outlook. I honestly don’t get it.
I feel like TechCrunch is mostly just a Google feature blog these days.
Exchange got this in 2007. Yawn.
Wow, Google jsut keeps getting more amazing every single day! Whats next.
Lou
http://www.anon-vpn.net.tc
Definitely many products have the ability to help schedule meetings by finding the next available free time – that’s not actually a difficult computer science problem. However, Google’s algorithms can help rank the best times when *no* time works for everyone (e.g. scheduling a meeting with 20 executives within the next 24 hours). This is much more difficult and requires looking into the conflicts themselves to see which ones aren’t really conflicts, which ones are soft conflicts, etc. Then, based on this information, showing the times that minimize impact to all parties.
Confused. Is this only for *re*scheduling? The name of it and parts of the post suggest this. But then why not use this functionality for scheduling in the first place?
There are a few good products which provide better solutions.
Neatcall for example does it much better
http://www.neatcall.com/
Hi
I think this is a great feature, however its not innovative in the least. I wouldnt be surprised if some other company had a patent on this either.
I think people need to get a sense on reality here and while google does have some great innovations, or buys them if needed, not every feature that google puts out is innovative.
I have used internally at IBM (My last position) Lotus Notes that has had this for probably over 10 years and in its latest versions not only matches peoples best available times but takes into account timezones as well.
Regards