I want to talk for a moment about Outlook and Google Calendars, and how they suck for corporate business\u00c2\u00a0use.<\/p>\n
Both products use an “event” model for creating calendar items – this make sense for actual events like birthday parties and appointments like visits to the doctor. When you go to create a calendar item, the starting questions are: WHEN is this event, and WHERE will it be?<\/p>\n
But for business use, the use case is usually “we need to get these 5 people in a room to discuss something and make a decision”. The starting question is: WHO needs to attend, and what is the meeting LENGTH? There may be a day in mind, but the specific time and place are driven by when each attendee has available time, and when a meeting room is available.<\/p>\n
Despite this being the primary model for most business meetings, I have never seen a tool take this approach for building meetings.<\/p>\n
Here is how I would design the flow for this tool:<\/p>\n
Inputs: \u00c2\u00a0Attendees (+optional\/required), meeting length, desired day<\/p>\n
Data: Attendee availability, room availability, room size<\/p>\n
Output: List of room\/time pairs that would work for the meeting that day. Optionally, times that would work the previous or next business day (assuming the previous day is still in the future).<\/p>\n
Action: User selects\u00c2\u00a0one of the returned time\/place results, is prompted for meeting name\/description and clicks “Create meeting”<\/p>\n
Result: Meeting is created at the selected time with the room and attendees specified, using the provided name\/description.<\/p>\n
This flow would make much more sense for booking meetings in a corporate setting. The default event method is fine for actual events, or larger meetings where the meeting can happen without all attendees present (e.g. department quarterly meeting).<\/p>\n
I’m tempted to give this a shot with the Google Calendar API, although a quick look appears to show the only method for checking if someone has a time free is to send a specific time range and get back a boolean, so there may be a lot of queries required to find a common time that works for everyone.<\/p>\n
One approach might be to take the required attendee count, query for rooms available that day (filtered by working hours and no meetings from noon-1pm), then for the times rooms are available, query each attendee.<\/p>\n
Results could be weighted, so if there are no times that would work for everyone, the count of free vs total attendees for a given time would be used for the sort, and could return with a “warning: X, Y and Z cannot attend at this time”.<\/p>\n
Definitely something worth playing around\u00c2\u00a0with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I want to talk for a moment about Outlook and Google Calendars, and how they suck for corporate business\u00c2\u00a0use. Both products use an “event” model for creating calendar items – this make sense for actual events like birthday parties and appointments like visits to the doctor. When you go to create a calendar item, the … Continue reading Outlook and Google Calendar Suck at Meetings<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/words.tev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/words.tev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/words.tev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/words.tev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/words.tev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/words.tev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/words.tev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/words.tev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/words.tev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}