Quick Pitch: Tungle is a calendar accelerator that makes it easier to schedule meetings across organizations, calendar systems, and time zones.
Genius Idea: Scheduling meetings and keeping abreast of people's availability is increasingly difficult as offices become more virtual and communication becomes more location-agnostic. Tungle is a great way to schedule or propose meeting times and to stay on top of your meetings and activities.
Tungle's biggest asset is that it integrates seamlessly with Outlook, Google Calendar, iCal for Mac OS X and Entourage for Mac. Support for Lotus Notes is coming soon.
Tungle basically hooks into your existing calendar and keeps track of when you are busy and when you are free. That way, if someone wants to propose a meeting time to you, they can instantly select times that they know you aren't busy.
Although signing up for a Tungle account certainly makes it easier to see who is available when and for what, you can invite or schedule meetings with people that don't have Tungle accounts easily. Those users get an e-mail with either a meeting date or a selection of times, confirm or select what time they can attend, and then both parties receive reminders before the meeting takes place. As a Tungle user, that meeting is automatically updated to the calendar you have synced with Tungle.
If you set-up the Tungle.me service, you can offer up your available/busy times to outsiders, so they can see what is going on and schedule a meeting with you. The best part is, the details of your meetings are never revealed, it just shows that you are busy if you choose to make your availability information public.
Tungle also has a Facebook application and can integrate with Ning, Xing and LinkedIn.
Tungle for iPhone
When I first played around with Tungle back in May, I was impressed. The latest Tungle addition -- Tungle for iPhone (iTunes link) -- really takes Tungle to a new level.
You can schedule meetings with contacts, view your contacts availability times as an overlay on your own calendar and easily see reminders for your meetings at a glance. The app is free and is a really nice addition to the Tungle service.
If you find yourself scheduling lots of meetings with people in or out of your network and often with different time zones, Tungle is definitely worth a try. It makes scheduling and managing meetings easy and it fits into your existing calendar workflow.
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