The Scheduling Insider

Google “schedule meetings” and find an array of free, simple, powerful scheduling tools designed to get everyone in the right place at the right time. The Interwebs is fantastic!

Google “schedule rooms” and you’ll also find a big selection of tools and applications, including ours, Meeting Room Manager.

Which goes to show you that, when it comes to choosing the right tools for your needs, there are no apples-to-apples comparisons. And no single tool can do it all.

That’s why it’s so important to distinguish between scheduling people and scheduling rooms, and to do that you must first identify your pain points.

If you’re a small business or organization that needs a scheduling tool accessible to multiple users (in other words, you need online access to the scheduling tool) and has rooms available for these meetings, consider the following:

Q. Are you having trouble finding a meeting time that fits the schedules of all attendees?
A. Try ScheduleOnce, a plug-in for Gmail and Google Calendar.  ScheduleOnce lets attendees mark the dates when they’re available and propose mutliple meeting times. It’s free and a great tool for a loosely affiliated group of people trying to organize a get-together.

Q. Do you need to schedule people, propose multiple meeting times and poll attendees to find out what they want to eat, what movie they want to see or make other group decisions?
A. Doodle is great for that, integrates with Outlook, Google Calendar, iCalendar and Facebook. Again, great for social meetings and casual business meetings.

Q. Are you trying to reserve a room that can accommodate your meeting and inform an administrator about the supplies and catering you might need at that meeting?
A. Meeting Room Manager Express is the best fit. While it does schedule people by intergrating with Outlook to view their calendars, it also lets you view all your rooms to see which are available when.

Among other things, here are some major differentiators between Meeting Room Manager Express and other online scheduling tools.

• Allows you to view all available rooms and choose the best fit
• Allows you to create waitlists for rooms and reserve rooms before inviting attendees
• Allows you to create room request forms
• Allows you to schedule multiple resources like catering or A/V
• Integrates with Outlook contacts and calendar
• Allows you to create groups of attendees
• Allows you to add prep and cleanup time

Take a look at the tour and sign up for a free 30-day trial.