Tungle Is Meeting Scheduling Magic

Lately, I’ve been using Tungle to make it easier for PR agencies to schedule briefings with me. It has cut down substantially on the amount of email. In some case, I don’t even get an email until a briefing is scheduled.

In the case of Comunicano, who is Tungle’s PR agency as well as a number of other companies I blog about, they now have visibility into my schedule. They can schedule meetings as appropriate. In another case, a different PR agency wanted to schedule a meeting. I simply set up a Tungle space, making a small portion of my schedule available for them.

Creating the Tungle space looks something like this:

After you click on the Create Space button and send off the invitation to your selected party members, they will get an email with a link to the “space” you created. What’s cool about this space is that if, in the meantime, your schedule changes, the space will be automatically updated with the new schedule information. To demonstrate that, I have scheduled an event in my calendar since sending out this space.

Here’s the space that is now shown:

The party–or parties–select what time is appropriate for them. Once everyone has an agreed-upon time, the Outlook invites are sent out automatically.

While I’m more than a little miffed that Tungle isn’t friendly with my employer’s firewall–a connection is needed to synchronize your free/busy information–I have ways around it. Despite this, I like the functionality provided by Tungle enough to use it. I hope to be able to get others to start using it once the firewall issues are sorted.