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Thanks to James, I’ve just discovered Tungle.me, a service to publish your availability.
Scheduling is one of the most time consuming (and least rewarding) tasks AR Managers have to perform in their duty, think of trying to play a 4D Tetris game or being a dating agency for high-speed particules in in LHC. Simply put, executives and IT analysts have a better chance to meet in an airport lounge than in a briefing I’ll arrange.
If all the analysts were on tungle.me, it would be easier to schedule calls as I could triangulate this with my execs calendars.
I hope IDC, Forrester or Gartner will adopt this.
For in person meetings, there are two other web 2.0 tools called dopplr and tripit, which allow you to share where you’ll be with a a selected group of people. Quite practical to see when analysts are attending conferences.
This aspect of declarative authorisation is important for privacy (and safety/security reasons), tungle.me should add this. You can of course mash those ones up with your LinkedIn profile and voila!
If only things were that simple 🙂 But I’m an optimist!
If your calendar is on Google Apps (or just Google), you can publish your busy/free times, too. Although that doesn’t give the direct scheduling capability of Tungle.me, if someone does send an invitation and you have your calendar set to automatically add (but not necessarily auto-accept) invitations, it will be shown as “busy” until you accept or decline. Works like a charm for me, I even display it on my site at http://www.column2.com/calendar and refer customers/vendors there instead of playing email tag to find a mutually-beneficial time.
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From your last Tungle invite, I got 7 different Tungle emails, many of them overlapping, and one inviting me after the event had taken place. Have to admit – it drove me mad trying to figure out if things had changed, what was new (nothing) or whatever. I think it still needs work?
Hi Clive,
Yes, the invite function isn’t great, for instance you can’t easily change meetings.
But IMHO it’s better than sharing your calendar via Google because you can control who can see it better.
I find Tripit very useful for travel-related scheduling. I’m going to check out Sandy’s not about making the free/busy info on google calendar available; hadn’t tried that before. Thanks, Sandy!
I also encourage AR folks to know the twitter handles of the analysts they follow. DMs are a great way to cut through the clutter.
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Have they cracked it now? See comments here: http://iiar.wpcomstaging.com/2012/05/18/the-hype-cycle-of-vendor-briefing-requests/
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