Do You Tungle?

The BrainYard - Where collaborative minds congregate.

Irwin Lazar, Vice President & Service Director, Nemertes Research

May 13, 2008

1 Min Read
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Last week I had the opportunity to chat with the folks over at Tungle, a Web 2.0 start-up attacking the problem of scheduling meetings with people outside of your organization.  Today, the typical solution is a whole lot of e-mailing back and forth.  With Tungle, the process is somewhat automated, saving a great deal of time and effort.

Tungle works via an Outlook plug-in which grabs your free/busy information from your calendar (support for other applications is on the roadmap).  Tungle users can schedule meetings via one of two ways:

  • by inviting other Tungle users who have agreed to be on their Tungle "buddy list" .  Tungle users can use their existing Outlook client's ability to search for available times and schedule a meeting through the same method they use with people inside their company

  • by inviting non-Tungle via  a link to a dynamic web-page that shows the Tungle user's available times.  The non-Tungle user simply selects a time that works for them, and then Tungle generates meeting invites to all parties.

There are a few quirks, Tungle is client-based rather than server-based, so the potential for conflict exists if someone with calendar administrator rights schedules a meeting for a user while that user is disconnected, and at the same time the user has scheduled his or her own meeting.  Still, Tungle strikes me as the most useful Web 2.0 app I've seen since Grandcentral.  Now I just have to wait patiently until they have a Notes 8 plug-in.

About the Author

Irwin Lazar

Vice President & Service Director, Nemertes Research

Irwin Lazar is the Vice President and Service Director at Nemertes Research, where he manages research operations, develops and manages research projects, conducts and analyzes primary research, and advises numerous enterprise and vendor clients. Irwin is responsible for benchmarking the adoption and use of emerging technologies in areas including VOIP, UC, video conferencing, social computing, collaboration, contact center and customer engagement.

A Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and sought-after speaker and author, Irwin is a blogger for No Jitter and frequent author for SearchUnifiedCommunications.com. He is a frequent resource for the business and trade press and is regular speaker at events such as Enterprise Connect and Interop. Irwin's earlier background was in IP network architecture, design and engineering.

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