One of the most frustrating things that most people have to do is schedule meetings with teams or committees of other people. Even if everyone in the group has email, you might spend several days wading through rounds of email responses to find a date and time when everyone in the group is available.

If you only schedule meetings with people in your own company, Microsoft made this process much easier with Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook, which will automatically identify common free times for booking appointments. However, Exchange Server can be expensive, and if team members work in a different company, you can’t easily browse their calendar availabilities.

Tungle solves this problem with an online solution that doesn’t care which calendar system your colleagues use. You can sign up for a Tungle account for free at www.tungle.me, and download a plug-in tool that will automatically create a calendar page for you on Tungle’s website. It only shows the times you are available or unavailable, not what you are doing.

People can request a meeting with you by using their mouse as a “paint roller” to highlight a free area on your calendar, and you will receive an email from Tungle asking if you wish to accept the meeting.

Tungle really shines in its ability to find common meeting times for a group of users. Suppose you work in a virtual team with five other people, all of whom post their availability on Tungle. To schedule a meeting, you can create a group distribution list for all of your team members, then use that to send a meeting notice through Tungle that will find the best time and date for the meeting based on everyone’s schedules.

If you prefer, you can select a range of times and dates for the meeting and ask recipients to select the best one for them. Tungle handles all the reconciliation work and tells you the best time for the meeting.

Tungle CEO Marc Gingras is happy to discuss the product, but is cagey about how they came up with the name Tungle.

“It’s a corporate secret that only the Tungle team knows,” he said, laughing in a telephone interview. Gingras says it typically can take 15 minutes to schedule a meeting by using traditional email tools to negotiate the time.

“We solve the pain of scheduling meetings,” he said. “The endless ping-pongs of back-andforth email to find a time to meet, that’s the problem we solve with the product.”

Traditional calendar applications mainly help you remember who you are meeting with, but don’t help you schedule meetings, especially beyond the company’s borders, Gingras explained.

“You use the calendar that you always use, and you use Tungle on top of that to schedule meetings,” he said.

If you are using Microsoft Outlook, Tungle adds a button to the tool bar and a complete dashboard panel on the Calendar view that you can use to generate Tungle-based meeting requests. In email messages, you can use a button on the tool bar to insert your Tungle URL in the email so recipients can check your calendar on their own. (If you want to see how this looks, my Tungle URL is http://tungle.me/PodcastSteve.) You can personalize your Tungle page with your photo and other contact information if you like.

Tungle frees you from having to make repeated lists of your availability for everyone who wants to have a meeting with you. You just say, “Tungle me!” and give them the URL, and they can suggest meeting times. It cuts out the discovery part of the process and moves you rapidly into the final negotiations on the date and time. You can also post a badge on your website that visitors can use to schedule a Tungle meeting.

Tungle is currently providing its basic scheduling service as a free option. Later this year, the company plans to offer a premium fee-based service that will have additional features for corporate users, but promises to keep the free version available, according to Gingras. More information at www.tungle.me. You can hear the complete conversation with Marc Gingras on the CompuSchmooze Podcast at www.compuschmooze.com. . steve@compuschmooze.com