A pop-up window for your MeetMe page

May 13, 2012 · 0 comments

A growing number of customers are choosing to embed their MeetMe page into their website. But what do you do when your site is narrow or when you want to embed the MeetMe page into a narrow space?

Angela Ruckman from Getter Done Gurus Services was kind enough to share with me a recent post from her blog in which she explains how to create a pop-up window for your MeetMe page.

You can click the above link to read the full details on Angela’s blog and also see how she implemented it for her own MeetMe page. If you just want to grab the code you can get it from here:

<a href="#" onclick="Popup=window.open('http://meetme.so/angelar', 'Popup', 'toolbar=no, location=no, status=no, menubar=no, scrollbars=no, resizable=yes, width=1064, height=800, left=350, top=20'); return false;">Schedule Time with Angela R</a>


Note that you will have to change meetme.so/angelar to your MeetMe link and the text “Schedule Time with Angela R” to the text that you want to have for yourself.

If you have any questions feel free to contact Angela or contact us via our support site.

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ScheduleOnce 3.1 is live

May 7, 2012 · 7 comments

ScheduleOnce 3.1 is finally live with the reminders functionality that many have been patiently waiting for. We apologize for the one week delay in getting this release out.

With this new release you can now define up to three email reminders for any scheduled time. For example, a reminder 24 hrs before, 12 hrs before and 1 hr before the scheduled time.

In inbound scheduling reminders are on the MeetMe page level, allowing you to set different reminders for different MeetMe pages. In Outbound scheduling reminders are in the outbound settings page and apply to all outbound meetings that you initiate.

Version 3.1 includes another important feature for the vast majority of inbound scheduling users who connect their Google Calendars. This is the ability to disable the Google Calendar invite that is sent to the user.

By default, when a booking is made, the user receives two emails. One is the scheduling confirmation from ScheduleOnce, and the other is the Google Calendar invite that is sent to the user from your connected Google Calendar account. There are many good reasons to disable the Google invite email. Read the Google invite article to learn more.

For those who are wondering where are the SMS reminders – Email reminders are only the first step and we will follow up with SMS reminders in a future release.

For the complete list of changes in ScheduleOnce 3.1 please see the What’s new in version 3.1 article.

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What’s coming up next? ScheduleOnce 3.1

April 18, 2012 · 2 comments

ScheduleOnce 3.1 is scheduled for release during the first week of May and beyond bug fixes and small enhancements, it includes two highly requested features:

Email reminders: You will be able to create up to three reminders for inbound and outbound scheduling. In inbound, reminder settings will be at the MeetMe page level so that you can create different reminders for different MeetMe pages. In outbound, reminders will be in the Outbound settings tab. Email reminders will be available in Plus accounts and higher.

Inbound scheduling – Option to remove the Google Calendar invite email that is sent to your users: If you are working with a connected calendar, when a booking is made the user receives two emails. One is the scheduling confirmation from ScheduleOnce, and the other is the Google Calendar invite that is sent from your connected Google Calendar account. When 3.1 is live it will be possible to disable the Google invite email. This option will be available in the Advanced booking settings in the Inbound settings page.

There are many other features that did not make it into the release but they will be coming shortly after. More details to come. If you have any feedback or comments please let us know.

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Our availability-based approach to group scheduling is being recognized

April 18, 2012 · 0 comments

When the market is overcrowded with old generation products, a new product with a superior approach may have a hard time convincing people that the new approach is indeed better. People are already entrenched in their existing usage patterns and are not always open to hear about different solutions that are more efficient.

This is the case with group scheduling. The main vendors in this space have been around for more than a decade. These group schedulers are basically survey tools that make your invitees vote on time alternatives. Is this a good method for finding a time for a meeting? In many cases it is not. You will have to create another survey if none of the time alternatives work.

Our availability-based approach is simpler and takes all possible alternatives into account without having to define them explicitly. This saves time and significantly increases the probability that a time for the meeting will be found. We have already written about this in our blog and explained why our availability based approach to group scheduling is a far better solution.

We know that it will take time for people to realize that our availability-based approach is a much better solution for their group scheduling needs. However, it is already starting to happen:

Elise McIntosh is the co-founder and Chief Product Office at LucidMeetings, a collaboration and web conferencing service that supports professional meeting preparation, a collaborative in-meeting experience, and effortless follow-through on meeting results. In her blog post on Free Tools for Scheduling Your Next Meeting, Elise is clearly recognizing the superiority of our availability-based approach to group scheduling. Here is a direct quote from the post:

“ScheduleOnce is my favorite of the scheduling tools, we use ScheduleOnce ourselves when scheduling demos or consulting appointments…”

“Where Doodle and Meeting Wizard use a survey approach to finding the best meeting time, SheduleOnce works by comparing all participants’ availability. Asking people to indicate when they’re available rather than pick from a limited set of pre-defined times can save some rounds on those occasions when none of the originally selected times work.”

We are happy to see that more and more people are recognizing the superiority of our availability based approach and we are confident that this trend will continue to grow.

At the end of the day the better product wins.

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ScheduleOnce 3.0 is live!

April 2, 2012 · 4 comments

Today we are announcing the release of ScheduleOnce 3.0, a major release that extends ScheduleOnce into additional personal and organizational use cases.

In ScheduleOnce 2.x the common use cases were 1)finding a time for a group meeting and 2)accepting appointments for yourself. ScheduleOnce 3.0 adds support for six more uses cases:

Offer multiple meeting types: Each meeting type can have different settings such as availability, location duration and more.
Accept appointments for your team: Your customers choose a team member and easily book them online.
Accept appointments for services: Your customers choose a service provider and easily book them online.
Accept appointments for activities: Easily fill your calendar with appointments for any type of activity.
Manage scheduling for others: Easily accept appointments for all the people you support.
Accept bookings for rooms & resources: Enable external users to easily book your resources online.

Watch our new introduction video:

The support for these additional use cases is made possible due to two important features:
–Ability to create multiple MeetMe pages
–Ability to consolidate multiple MeetMe pages into a BookNow page

These two major features, the robust and flexible design of the system, and our ability to connect to multiple calendars for different users, are now allowing us to support individuals as well as organizations with advanced scheduling scenarios.

As a result of the new functionality we have also modified our plans and pricing. We have added more plans to support the new use cases, and in addition, we have moved all plans to a monthly billing cycle. We hope that these changes in pricing will make it easier for new users to adopt ScheduleOnce. See our new pricing.

It is also important to reiterate our policy that any pricing changes will not affect our existing customers who will continue to be billed according to their original plan and price that was in effect at that time.

This release makes ScheduleOnce a much better product and makes it attractive to a considerably wider audience. We hope that you share our excitement and can help us spread the news!

To learn more about the complete list of changes see the What’s new in version 3.0 article.

To learn more about our support the new use cases please check our new Solutions section.

Watch additional new videos:

Inbound Scheduling

BookNow pages

Outbound scheduling

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Early preview of ScheduleOnce 3.0

February 20, 2012 · 2 comments

During the last few months we’ve been working on a new ScheduleOnce release – ScheduleOnce 3.0 which will add support for new use cases such as:

Support for multiple meeting types: Enabling you to offer different types of meetings, each one with its own characteristics. For example. Face to face meetings and phone meetings.

Support for multiple team members: Enabling you to accept appointments for multiple team members. For example, you have four consultants and need to accept bookings for them.

Support for multiple services: Enabling you to offer multiple services, each one with its own characteristics. For example, offering different types of massage.

Support for rooms and resources: Enabling you to offer booking of rooms and resources, each one with its own characteristics. For example, you have a a few conference rooms that people should be able to reserve and use during the show.

If any of these use cases are relevant to you we would love to show you a demo of the new release and listen to your feedback.

To schedule a demo, please contact us and tell us who you are and which use case you are interested in.

We look forward to hearing your feedback.

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Using your MeetMe page to get better qualified leads

February 6, 2012 · 0 comments

We have a wide range of customers across many industries and people are using their MeetMe page for scheduling different types of appointments. During the last few weeks we have come across a few customers who are using their MeetMe page in the leads acquisition process and we though that this may be interesting to write about.

The common method of capturing leads from a website is via a web form. Leads fill the form and hope that someone will get back to them soon. In some cases there is an automatic email that is sent back to the lead and confirms that the inquiry has been received.

What we have seen some customers do is add their MeetMe page to the automatic email, saying something like:

“Thank you for contacting us. Please use this link to tell us when and how you would like to be contacted. We will make sure to get back to you with the right person at at right time”

Text such as this with the MeetMe link is a great qualifier as a lead that schedules time with you is showing that they are serious about their interest in your business. They are also getting better service since you are giving them the option to select the time which is convenient for them and they are not just left to wander when someone will get back to them. This shows professionalism and a focus on great customer service.

Do you have more tips to add? we will be happy to hear them :)

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Strong opening for 2012

January 29, 2012 · 0 comments

We have started 2012 on a strong note. January is not over yet but we can say with confidence that this is a record month. We are seeing a big pickup in activity and new signups, especially for our Premium and Professional plans.

It’s great to start the year with such a strong momentum. We are currently working on another major update to ScheduleOnce that is expected to go live around the end of this quarter. We will be back later in the quarter with more information about this upcoming release.

Thank you all for your support!

The ScheduleOnce team

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Our availability-based approach to group scheduling

January 9, 2012 · 0 comments

“The availability-based approach ensures that all possible alternatives are taken into account without asking the meeting organizer to define each one of them”

Some of our existing and potential users have used other group scheduling applications in the past. When they first use ScheduleOnce they realize that it is different. In this article we explain why it is different and why our availability-based approach is far better than the common poll-based approach.

A group scheduler is a web application that is used to find a common time to meet for a group of people. Meeting schedulers differ by many factors but there is one big difference that anyone who needs to select a meeting scheduler should be aware of:

Is the meeting scheduler based on availability or is it a poll-based application?

Poll-based meeting schedulers are the most common. These meeting schedulers have been around for more than 10 years and are actually survey tools that were adapted to survey on times. How do these tools work? You need to set your alternatives – each alternative is a different meeting time. Once your meeting time alternatives are set you ask invitees to respond to the poll and say on each time if they can make it or not. Since this method is basically a poll, it works well in a narrow set of cases where the dominant decision factor is the day on which people can meet and not the time. For example, can you meet on Tuesday at 2:00pm or on Wednesday at 2:00pm? In such a scenario the time is constant and only the day is changing. However, if the time is also part of the decision this method is inferior to the availability based method – We will shortly explain why.

Availability-based meeting schedulers are pretty new and there aren’t many of them yet. The most popular is ScheduleOnce. With an availability-based meeting scheduler there is no poll, there is only providing of availability. The meeting organizer provides her availability for the meeting and then all invitees are requested to provide their availability. Once everyone’s availability is provided the system automatically does the matching and recommends the best time or times. The advantages of this approach are its better time finding capability, its simplicity and speed. These benefits make this method appropriate in professional business environments and make it especially popular among people who use electronic calendars, since working with availability makes perfect sense to them. However, since it is not a poll, the availability based method is not a good fit when the dominant decision factor is not the time, like in the case of deciding between days when the time is constant.

So we touched briefly on the two methods – Now lets dive deeper into the differences by using a simple example. Let’s say that you are the meeting organizer and you want to organize a one hour meeting. You are available on Tuesday from 9:00am-12:00pm or on Thursday from 2:00pm-4:00pm. With an availability-based scheduler all you have to do is exactly what we just did – Say when you’re available. With a poll-based scheduler what you have to do is provide meeting time alternatives. Now, if you want to have good alternative coverage like an availability-based scheduler you will have to provide many alternatives: From Tuesday 9:00am-10:00am, then 9:15am-10:15am, then 9:30am-10:30am, etc. You will end up providing many alternatives which will take you a long time and force your invitees to rate many alternatives, which will take them a long time. This is causing lots of work which no one likes to do. So what do people do? They only mark a few alternatives, missing out on many others which are inherently provided in an availability-based scheduler.

So if you are using a poll-based meeting scheduler you and your invitees either have to do more work or you and your invitees will have to accept a less than optimal time finding approach which will often result in no time being found, causing more work and redundant cycles.

Based on the above analysis, if the dominant decision factor is the time, there is no advantage whatsoever in a poll-based scheduler vs. an availability-based scheduler. Poll-based schedulers are basically a subset of a generic poll system. Availability-based schedulers were truly designed for scheduling and not branched out of a poll system.

So if you are looking for a meeting scheduler for your business, don’t be tempted to go for a poll-based scheduler. These schedulers are currently more common because they have been around for a while but they are much less efficient than availability-based schedulers. Once you get used to an availability-based scheduler you will not understand how you could have managed with a poll-based scheduler.

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Why ScheduleOnce?

December 22, 2011 · 0 comments

We are often asked by prospects and users of other scheduling applications why ScheduleOnce is a better solution. In this post we would like to provide a summary of the key differentiation points.

Quick process for the invitee: Our invitee interface is designed to support the minimum possible number of clicks, allowing invitees to schedule meetings and appointments in a matter of seconds.

No exposure of free/busy view: Our invitee interface does not expose your free/busy view. Do you actually want people to know how busy you are? Or guess that you are on vacation when you have a number of days blocked out? This cannot happen in ScheduleOnce. Our invitee interface only exposes time slots over which you have complete control. There is a saying that no one wants to eat in an empty restaurant and on the same token, if you are selling a service, no one wants to see that you have no bookings.

Full control over time slots: ScheduleOnce has a number of settings that allow you to fully control how many time slots you present each day, when they start and how much lead time you should have before a time slot is presented.

Most flexible availability framework: ScheduleOnce allows you to define your availability for any possible scenario. You can use recurring availability only, date-specific availability only, or use recurring availability and add date-specific exceptions.

Inbound and outbound scheduling: ScheduleOnce supports both inbound and outbound scheduling in one integrated application that covers all scheduling needs. Inbound scheduling allows you to publish your MeetMe link and accept appointments online, and outbound scheduling lets you to initiate the meeting invitation, propose a few times and select the ones that works best. Inbound scheduling is used for one on one meetings and outbound scheduling is typically used for group meetings.

Schedule automatically or with approval: ScheduleOnce allows you to select the mode in which you would like to use your inbound MeetMe page. In appointment mode people select a single time on your page and the appointment is scheduled without any action on your part. In Meeting mode you ask people to select a few times, you then review the times and schedule the one that works best for you.

Time zone and Daylight Saving Time: ScheduleOnce has robust support for time zones and Daylight Saving Time. We detect the time zone of the user based on their IP address and not their PC clock which may be wrong or not adjusted to the time zone they are in. In addition, ScheduleOnce maintains its own database of Daylight Saving Time changes in more than 300 locations worldwide. This allows us to be 100% accurate in our scheduling even in periods when Daylight Saving Time starts and ends. Furthermore, it is possible to turn off time zones completely and use ScheduleOnce with or without time zones.

Deepest Google integration: ScheduleOnce made a strategic decision to focus on integration with Google Calendar and to do it in the best possible way. We have been a Google Launch partner for the Google Apps Marketplace and are ranked at the top of the Calendar & scheduling category. Our integration with Google allows us to connect to any Google Calendar, view busy time and schedule the meeting directly in the calendar. Another important point about our integration with Google – We never store any Google Calendar information on our servers. We simply access Google Calendar in real time with a secure token that is generated by Google and we have no access to any Google customer data.

Most secure Outlook integration: Outlook is a desktop application and as such it must be synchronized with a cloud database that will store its meetings and appointments. Some vendors have developed proprietary connectors that sync between Outlook and their own database, storing all Outlook meetings and appointments on their server. In our opinion this solution is not secure enough, definitely not for the enterprise. Our approach is to use the free Google Outlook sync program – An excellent, lightweight program that always works and instantly syncs Outlook with Google Calendar. This turns Google Calendar into the cloud storage for Outlook meetings and ScheduleOnce can connect to Google Calendar and retrieve the data securely in real time so that it is never stored on our servers.

Most secure iCal integration: iCal is a desktop application and as such it must be synchronized with a cloud database that will store its meetings and appointments. Some vendors have developed proprietary connectors that sync between iCal and their own database, storing all iCal meetings and appointments on their server. In our opinion this solution is not secure enough, definitely not for the enterprise. Our approach is to use the ability of iCal and Google Calendar to sync via CalDAV, an open protocol that allows syncing calendars without installing any software. This turns Google Calendar into the cloud storage for iCal meetings and ScheduleOnce can connect to Google Calendar and retrieve the data securely in real time so that it is never stored on our servers.

Designed and built as an enterprise system: SchduleOnce was designed and built as an enterprise system with enterprise grade features. We were never targeting the social type of scheduling or helping friends organize meetings. Our users have been and always will be individuals, small businesses and enterprises that use ScheduleOnce to schedule time in their core business and revenue generating processes.

Modern and highly usable: ScheduleOnce is developed with the latest internet technologies and has a rich client interface that runs on any modern browser. We keep hearing from our clients that our usability and user interface is better than others.

High-performance application: ScheduleOnce was designed with performance and scalability in mind. We are deployed in a first grade data center and use a first class CDN so that users all over the world can have a great experience.

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