Meeting “Fixing”

Gaurav, Google has the answer to the biggest problem that large companies face – scheduling meetings!  Techcrunch reviews Google’s Smart Rescheduler feature here

“The person scheduling the meeting enters the names of the participants, how long the meeting will be, and a date by when the meeting must take place. The Smart Rescheduler then goes out and looks at everyone’s calendar to see when everyone is free, taking into account different time zones and other commitments on their calendars

What the Rescheduler does is look at all the soft constraints and actually ranks the best meeting times. Different attendees can be prioritized so the meeting is set around their schedule. Soft constraints are taken into account like partial schedule overlaps, times blocked with no other attendees, meetings where someone’s been invited but hasn’t yet accepted, or meetings organized by that person. These factors often indicate a schedule that can be altered.”

Personally, I love the last bit – the algorithms used to determine what can be changed.  Especially the “times blocked with no other attendees”.  No more games of blocking one’s calendar with random activities, just to prevent other’s from trying to schedule meetings during that time.  It also suggests that meetings can take precedence over anything else – a worrying sign if someone actually hoped to get work done in office!