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Rikki Endsley

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Schedule Events with Doodle

Doodle provides an easy, free way to schedule meetings and events online.

By Rikki Endsley on Mon, 12/19/11 - 1:43pm.

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Last week Doodle rolled out the beta release of iCal Connector, which lets Mac users sync their iCal calendars with Doodle. Google, Outlook, and Exchange connectors are already available.

If you've ever had to organize a conference call with several colleagues working remotely, for example, you are familiar with the emails that go back and forth just to set a time and day that works for everyone. With Doodle, you can propose several times and your colleagues can specify which ones fit into their schedules.

Users can also set up a personalized MeetMe Page with a profile picture and personalized information. You'll need to set up a Doodle account before claiming your MeetMe page, but the process is quick, free, and painless.

Doodle offers a free ad-supported version that doesn't require registration. A premium version is ad-free and costs US$ 39 for an individual license, US$ 479 for up to 1,000 users, and custom pricing for larger organizations. Mobile versions and iPhone and Android apps are also available.

Based in Zurich, Switzerland, Doodle rolled out the Doodle.com online scheduling service in 2007. The Debian-based service uses a MySQL database. In April 2011, the company announced that it started using MongoDB, too, and plans to migrate more information over to that database. The announcement explained more about the Doodle architecture, saying:

Doodle is basically a Java application and Tomcat its web container. For the time being, we still use Tomcat 6 but are going to switch to Tomcat 7 soon. However, when browsers (or API clients such as our Android app) send requests to doodle.com, they do not directly interact with one of the Tomcat instances but with one of our Apache servers. The Apache servers are responsible for balancing the load and for delivering static content (e.g., images) without having to involve any of the Tomcat instances.

In October, Doodle announced that it had reached 10 million users per month for September 2011, with the main users located in Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, and the United States.