ScrambledTech

 

The only thing worse than company meetings is trying to schedule one. The more people who need to be at that meeting, the harder it is to find a time slot that works with everyone’s schedule. A new Google Calendar Labs feature called the Smart Rescheduler brings some search smarts to the problem. “Overnight, all the Google apps customers will get this,” says Google Calendar

product manager Cyrus Mistry. “It is like we are giving every employee their own administrative assistant.”

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 (in order for this to work, all the meeting attendees must share their calendars with Google Calendar).

All too often at this point in the process, someone has a conflict. 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.

Google Calendar throws all of these factors together and comes up with a ranking for the best possible meeting time. “We did look at algorithms for search to see how they solved which doc should come to the top,” says Mistry. “We discover what meeting should come out on top.” The Rescheduler can even book new conference rooms based on which one is closest to the original one and the same size.

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CrunchBase Information

Google Calendar

 

Company:	Google
Website:	google.com/calendar
Launch Date:	April 13, 2006

Google Calendar lets users create events, manage multiple calendars and share calendars with teams and groups. Users can view their calendar by day, week or month. Calendar has a “Quick Add” feature that lets you input natural language entries… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

There’s no question that Google is setting its sights on taking some of Microsoft’s marketshare in the productivity suite space. Last year, Google announced a new plug-in that syncs Google’s enterprise versions of Apps, including Gmail, contacts, and calendar, with Microsoft’s Outlook. And Google just acquired Docverse, an application lets users collaborate directly on Microsoft Office documents. Today Google is taking another swipe at Microsoft with a new tool

that makes it significantly easier to make the switch over to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange.

Google Apps Migration

for Microsoft Exchange is a new server-side tool that migrates a company’s email, calendar and contact data from Microsoft Exchange, an email server software product from Microsoft, to Google Apps. Google promises ease with the tool, allowing IT administrators the ability to select the mail, calendar and contact data to move in phases and migrate hundreds of users at the same time. Plus, employees can use Exchange during the migration without any interruption. The tool works with Exchange 2033 and 2007 for both on-premise and hosted applications and is available to the enterprise and education versions of Google Apps.

This is clearly a play at showing businesses how simple it is to move from from Microsoft products, such as Exchange, that may not be hosted in the cloud to the cloud-based Google Apps product. Google product Manager Matt Glotzbach told me that the search giant wants to make it as simple as possible for potential customers to make the switch to Google Apps, and many potential Google Apps’ clients are using Microsoft Exchange to host and power email, calendar, and contacts. Google also launched Google Apps Migrator for Lotus Notes and a Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server

.

Google Apps has steadily been growing; already 25 million people are using the Apps product. And that also includes over 2 million businesses ranging from startups, to small businesses, to Fortune 500 companies. And Google is developing a compelling ecosystem around Google Apps, recently launching the Google Apps Marketplace, which is an an app store for enterprise apps in the cloud.

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CrunchBase Information

Google Apps

Company:	Google
Website:	google.com/apps
Launch Date:	August, 2006

Google Apps (formerly known as Google Apps for your domain), is a web-based office suite offering businesses email, document creation, and collaboration functionality. Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase