Does anyone out there have a super effecient and elegant method for organizing and scheduling meetings with people in your company?
We want a system that is easy for all employees to use.
We want to be able to say: I need these 9 people at a meeting, what is the next available time slot…and have the system tell us what times are available.
We might also want to be able to say: we need a room with a projector and a laptop and please email maintenance to rearrange the room and email IS and request they are available for connectivity issues.
If you do have such a system, can you explain who manages it? do you have a single employee in charge of approving and adjusting such schedules??
I work for a mega-corp and we use Outlook combined with an automated conference call system. A meeting organizer (anyone) sends out an invite to all parties. Outlook shows everyone’s schedule as you check for available times. You just select the most appropriate time and it gets sent that looks like an e-mail but, when someone opens it, there are Accept, Decline, and Tentative buttons as well as the ability to send an e-mail back to everyone on the list or just the organizer. When people respond, Outlook tracks it on everyone’s calendar and sends out automatic reminders. Those are standard Outlook features.
We have admins that schedule the many conference rooms but some companies use Outlook for that as well by listing each room or resource as its own entity to be scheduled through the same Outlook functions that you invite people. There are usually automatic replies from the room or other resource.
We have a conference call option as well for most of our meetings. We use software called MeetingPlace that lets you book conference calls on-line. It books a time and a call-in number. Any number of people can join as they please during the meeting via a fancy speaker phone. It also offers web conferencing and demonstrations along with other wizz-bang features.
Both my current and my previous employer just used Microsoft Outlook talking to a Microsoft Exchange server. It handles meeting requests very nicely. (I’m at home and I don’t have Outlook at home, so please forgive minor oopses in my description).
You just open up your calendar, choose “Request meeting” from the menus, select everyone and everything you need (rooms and equipment can be set up as resources so that you can see if they are available and “inviting” them is equivalent to telling whoever is responsible for the resource that you need it then). Find a clear space without any bars that indicate that someone/something is already booked, and type your meeting invitation. I like the facility a lot.
Now, if you are not running Outlook and Exchange server, I dunno.
At my company the commander says, “billyb0b I need you, Airman Snuffy, Sgt Slaughter, and three random others at building XYZ tomorrow at 1422 hours.” And we all just show up. Works great!
Meetings and people are two different things. Rooms are simple - we have a web based, Java app that lets you search for free conference rooms. At the moment, my building is a bit far from anywhere else, and there are only a few rooms, so you just grab one. I just ran a big meeting in one of our big (200 person) rooms. It only allows you to reserve 90 days ahead, so the secret is getting up early 90 days before you want to have your meeting and grab it.
I have used a system that supposedly looks for free times common to everyone’s schedule. The probability of finding an empty slot common to any significant number of busy people is near zero, so you either set up a meeting and accept that some people can’t come, or iterate until you find a free time, which is usually a few weeks in the future. So, no one uses the tools we do have for scheduling meetings in my company.
We’ve struggled with this for a while. My company is a little over 5 years old, has a dozen employees and runs everything on the cheap.
We were using Outlook for e-mail, so we started using Outlook to schedule meetings. Unfortunately, we didn’t have an Exchange server, so we didn’t have the ability to look at one another’s calendars, so scheduling became a nightmare as business picked up.
Then we all upgraded to Outlook 2007 and started using the Internet Calendars feature. People can publish their calendars to the Internet and set permissions as to who can see what. Nice solution if you want to be able to easily schedule meetings without having to invest in an Exchange server.
These days, though, many hosting companies are offering Exchange hosting on the cheap, so we may move in that direction. In the next week or so, I’ll be setting up a couple test accounts to see if this approach will make things even simpler.
At another company, I used an application called Meeting Maker that wasn’t half bad. That’s another potential solution for ya…
GroupWise works well for us. If you keep your meetings on it, others can schedule you and see if you’re free. We also use it to book rooms, so you address the meeting invite to the people and the room, do a busy search, and then book it.
We use the Meeting Maker application where I work, I love it. It handles people and also lets you designate rooms as “participants.” Each person handles their own calendar (or the higher-ups have assistants who do), so each individual handles their own approving and whatnot. It doesn’t solve the problem of the guy with the “golly, I just can’t remember to check that high-tech calendar thingy” but he’s also the guy with the “golly, that email thingy is just so hard, I never read it” so my problem with him goes beyond the calendar, you know?
I’m just subscribing to the thread because at my company the way we get production meetings going is by me running around and sometimes physically pulling people into a room to get a project meeting started. Oh, and the fifteen emails per meeting about “jimmy’s not availaible? what about now?” “sally’s not here then? what about x?” Oh sweet jesus the pain.
We use Oracle Calendar which lists people and meeting rooms. You can select the target group including both people and rooms and page through days until you see an opening. You can then automatically e-mail the attendees to let them know about the meeting, and add your own comments as needed.
There are thousands of employees across a few sites and it works well. Except for some holdouts who don’t use Calendar.
The technology is out there. One important component is management who require all employees to keep an online calendar up to date. Also, to deal with the wise*sses who try to get out of meetings by blocking off entire days for random reasons. You might as well get top management on board with this now while you’re identifying the technology. Hopefully they are not so naive as to think that if they buy the software, the human element will just fall into place.
We also use the same system Shagnasty described. For the conference rooms that are shared resources, we also use outlook - for the local ones that aren’t shared we use Sun One Calendar Express.
