Scheduling meetings with Doodle

Mark Gibbs' Web site tips, plus network applications news headlines

A large number of you checked out the test calendar I set up for the recent newsletter on a free scheduling service called When is Good (WIG). The only common complaint was that WIG doesn't allow you to specify a time window; it only permits time to be selected in intervals of 15, 30, or 60 minutes or whole days.

A reader pointed out that there’s similar service (also free) called Doodle that they contended was better. Doodle takes a slightly different approach by asking you to select the days you want to schedule within and then assign time slots within the days. Thus you might select Monday through Thursday and then create slots named, for example, “09:00 – 11:00” and “13:00 – 15:00”. The names that you choose for the slots is freeform so you can use whatever descriptions you please.

When completed a message is sent to your e-mail address and you can then circulate the link in the message to all participants. When the participants follow the link they will be presented with a page that shows a table with the days and slots listed across the top and the participants who have responded down the left hand side. You simply enter your name in the next available participant name field and check the boxes of the slots you’ll be available for.

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A large number of you checked out the test calendar I set up for the recent newsletter on a free scheduling service called When is Good (WIG). The only common complaint was that WIG doesn't allow you to specify a time window; it only permits time to be selected in intervals of 15, 30, or 60 minutes or whole days.

A reader pointed out that there’s similar service (also free) called Doodle that they contended was better. Doodle takes a slightly different approach by asking you to select the days you want to schedule within and then assign time slots within the days. Thus you might select Monday through Thursday and then create slots named, for example, “09:00 – 11:00” and “13:00 – 15:00”. The names that you choose for the slots is freeform so you can use whatever descriptions you please.

When completed a message is sent to your e-mail address and you can then circulate the link in the message to all participants. When the participants follow the link they will be presented with a page that shows a table with the days and slots listed across the top and the participants who have responded down the left hand side. You simply enter your name in the next available participant name field and check the boxes of the slots you’ll be available for.

A minor issue here is that once you’ve committed your selections you can’t edit them (this would be easily fixed with a cookie to identify the line a user had edited).

Unlike WIG, Doodle doesn’t rank participant availability, allow participants to comment, or allow the organizer to play ‘what if’ by disabling the selections of participants. Doodle’s advantages are that it does suggest the most popular time and its ability to schedule specific time slots.

What would be ideal would be to merge the two services – both WIG and Doodle have unique features that make them stand out – and then link them to iCal and Google calendar. Also support for multi-day block scheduling would be great.

You can try out Doodle using a schedule I set up.

So, is Doodle better? When it comes to managing blocks of time within days it is definitely but the user interface of WIG is in many ways better and slicker. I think that for scheduling whole day events I’d probably use WIG, while for meetings I’d use Doodle.

So try out Doodle and, if you haven’t done so already, try When Is Good as well and let me know what you think.

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Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.