Organising meetings: Doodle
Doodle allows you to invite people to attend a meeting and for the attendees to choose when they can attend from a range of dates and times that you dictate.
It’s one of those fantastic apps that spreads so quickly among users. I think this is due to two things: it’s extremely easy to use and it has a very limited application. It just does what it does without too many bells and whistles. All too often we’ve seen nice clean simple apps which have become over-burdened and confused by feature-creep (Quark Express suffered greatly from this in my opinion).
It only takes a few clicks to set up an account and give Doodle times for your meetings. It then emails you with an admin link (to allow you to make further changes) and an invite link (to email around to whomever you wish). An example of what an invitee see is included below:
They just click the times they can make and press save. The product becomes all the more efficient because, as those giving their availability later come in, they can see the most likely dates for the meeting according to the availability of other invitees. So they often change their own schedule accordingly.
How does all this help? Well, if you’ve ever tried to bring a dozen or so people into one room for the same period of time you’ll understand just how many emails and phone calls are involved. Doodle provides a very simple answer; let them do it themselves.
You can find the tool here: http://www.doodle.com/