Care to Tungle?
Author: Hunter Holcombe
June 2008
Techno Files
Meetings—from the budget to the overarching theme to the nitty-gritty details—are what we do best, and it takes a special blend of creativity, flexibility and experience to pull them off.
Simply finding a time slot to hold the meeting, however, can be quite an exercise, especially if you are playing mediator to everyone’s diverse scheduling conflicts. When it’s the big annual retreat you’re planning for next year, no problem—most attendees won’t have set schedules that far in advance. But when it comes to the smaller, more immediate meetings, you may find yourself spending hours just zeroing in on that sweet spot of availability on everyone’s calendar.If schedule-wrestling is not your favorite workplace pastime, a new product called Tungle could help you delegate this time-sucking duty to the infinite abilities of your computer. “People are spending more time coordinating the meeting than actually having it,” explains Marc Gingras, founder and CEO of Montreal-based Tungle Corporation, which just launched its beta version last month. “You spend a lot of time e-mailing back and forth and making phone calls, and it’s getting even more complex because more and more companies are working in diverse teams across different time zones.”
Tungle is basically an application that integrates with Microsoft Outlook, designed specifically to manipulate the calendar function into finding the available time slots of potential attendees. If you have a range of a week in which to hold a half-day board of directors meeting, for example, you can simply highlight that week on your calendar and send it out as an e-mail notification. When attendees open up the link in their inbox, the requested week matches up with their own personal calendar and they can choose which blocks of time from that week work with their availability. Whatever conflicts are already scheduled on that attendee’s calendar will automatically be removed from the week, leaving only the free blocks of time. As each attendee receives the e-mail, and responds with their availability, the block gets whittled down into a set of time ranges that work for everyone. Planners can then simply choose when to hold the meeting from those available slots, assured that it will work for everyone. Planners can even check if there are too many conflicts for too many people halfway through the process, cancel the attempt and try again with a different week.
It may sound complicated on paper, but using the program is actually quite simple. Potential attendees simply click on the meeting slots that work for them and hit “send.” When the meeting is scheduled, they receive a notification. The real time-saving advantage is on the planner side, however. Because planners need only send out the initial e-mail, they can get back to their other work while the program does its thing. Once everyone has responded, it’s just a matter of approving a time slot with one click of the mouse.
“Time is money,” Gingras says. “With this, once you have created it, you sit back and let everyone else decide. You don’t need to waste time as a negotiator.”
While currently the host must be using Microsoft Outlook to send out the meeting request, recipients can be using a number of different calendar/e-mail programs, such as Google Calendar, iCal (Mac) or Lotus Notes. Tungle will prove particularly useful for companies that do not use exchange servers, which allow for interoffice communication and meeting coordination. But exchange servers typically do not allow communication beyond the physical office, whereas Tungle does not have hardware or software restrictions.
Tungle is only in its beta phase, so it will continue to be refined as user feedback begins coming in. Gingras hopes his program will eventually become a standard component of Outlook, but in the meantime, it can be downloaded at the company site. And this brings us to the best money-saving feature of Tungle—it’s free. tungle.com
