Use Doodle to easily schedule a meeting

Hate playing the email game when trying to schedule and arrange an office or team meeting? Why not try Doodle?

As a virtual worker, I am used to working remotely, but even being comfortable in that environment, there is always one time that causes an issue – trying to schedule a meeting.

Enter my latest Internet find, an online scheduling tool called Doodle. According to the description of the company website, Doodle is, “The world’s leading online scheduling tool, Doodle takes the pain out of finding the right date and time for a group of people to meet and makes scheduling virtually effortless.”

Overall, Doodle appears to be pretty simple, but at the same time it seems like it will be very effective. I will point out that I have not yet tried this in action, but have played with it enough on my own to believe that it will work when the time comes.

Just to start, two of the reasons that I like it are due to the fact that it is free to use and it is all web based. In other words, there is nothing for users to setup and install. They just login and take care of what they need to so your team can quickly agree on a meeting time.

In short, the person in charge sets up the Doodle with a variety of times that he or she picks for the meeting. Once that is complete, the Doodle is sent out to the members of the team, who then have to login and pick the times that will work best for them. After that is complete, the organizer can then pick the best time using the data that was given, which is a chart of whether people can or cannot make it at a certain time. The organizer simply picks the time that has the most OK’s.

Basically, Doodle will do what you can already do with email, except it is all in one central location and avoids the messy multiple emails that often cause something to get missed.

One of the drawbacks, or maybe just a minor annoyance, is that they display Google ads on the site, they are simple and unobtrusive, but at the same time it felt strange at first. Of course, Doodle is available for free, so I will gladly take a few ads and not have to pay.

One of the other perks is calendar integration; Doodle offers a sync plugin for Outlook, as well as an ICS feed that will work with other calendars such as iCal and Google Calendar. They even offer a Facebook app. All things considered, Doodle seems like it could be effective for a regular company meeting, a virtual company meeting or even trying to arrange a get together with friends and family.

Filed Under: Cloud Computing > How-To > Productivity Tools
Tags: collaboration, doodle, meeting, Office, online, schedule, team, virtual