Now I didn’t know what it was but when I opened the accompanying link it became clear quite soon. An online calendaring tool allowing me to find an available time in the support engineers calendar. I could simply check a few available dates/times that would suit me and complete the form. Lovely feature and I felt right at home as the Lotus Notes scheduler principal isn’t that much different.
Still I didn’t think much more of it. I’m really content with my Lotus Calendar and wasn’t about to start logging everything in both my Lotus as well as in an online agenda. Little did I know (or investigate!), but a plugin to synchronize your Lotus Notes calendar to Tungle is already available and better even: It works both ways!
So now I can schedule in either my Notes or Tungle calendar and it will be updated automatically to the other calendar. But why do this? I mean, I can schedule in my Lotus calendar and for now not many of my contacts (3 out of an initial 200) seem to have found Tungle and shared their availability online yet. So why would I share mine?
Well because even though people haven’t shared their availability they can still view mineand use that to schedule an appropriate meeting time with me. Saving me valuable time on calling or mailing back and forth about suitable dates. And by doing so I hope eventually more people in my network will become enthusiastic about this way of working and start sharing their availability as well. Creating something like an overall Scheduling network that isn’t depending on company borders, administrators and network restrictions and makes scheduling a lot more effective!
- Check out Ed Brills post about Tungle and the future of calendaring.
- Also check out the cool little Tungle widget they’ve provided (example in the right hand menu of this blog) that allows you to display your availability and schedule a meeting right within your blog or site!
For those coming to NLLUG in Amsterdam: I will be discussing Tungle as well during my session on Social Plugins on September 9th!