Switching over to the Internet Age

April 14, 2008 9:04 PM

Looking for free online schedulers.

I need to find a good online scheduler to help manage meetings for a group that I belong to. It should preferably be:

1) Internet based and free of charge
2) very user friendly (most of the members in the group are older people, and they're pretty limited in their knowledge of computers). Even better if the scheduler doesn't require every member to sign up for an account with the hosting site.
3) adding and deleting rights are open to everyone

We have meetings twice a week and host numerous special events, sometimes at short notice, and it can be a nightmare to arrange everything through email with everyone. The whole purpose of this is for people to go on the page and confirm whether they will be able to attend said event/meeting or not, and maybe leave a few comments. Does anyone know of anything like this?

Thanks for any inputs!

posted by elisynn to computers & internet (12 comments total)

doodle.ch may work
posted by chrisamiller at 9:35 PM on April 14

Google apps?

Our larger parent company junked their outlook based MS Exchange scheduler in favour of Google calendar. They haven't looked back.

I think you can make the calendar public so no sign-up needed to view it.
posted by mattoxic at 9:40 PM on April 14

I have no experience with any of these and I'm not sure which one would meet your needs:

Timbridge
Meet-O-Matic
Doodle
Acuity Scheduling
posted by sharkfu at 9:58 PM on April 14 [1 favorite]

oops: *Timebridge. link is good though.
posted by sharkfu at 10:17 PM on April 14

WhenIsGood.net works well, but apparently requires a relatively recent browser.
posted by rdn at 10:18 PM on April 14

Seconding using Google Calendar. Very intuitive to use.
posted by peacheater at 11:03 PM on April 14

I've got 60 year old professors using Doodle. It's dead simple -- type in your name, check some boxes, hit the button.
posted by dw at 12:24 AM on April 15

Google Calendar is very easy to drive. One of the really handy things about it is that you can easily view multiple overlapping calendars, using assignable colors to distinguish entries belonging to one calendar from entries on another. You can also send invitations to calendar events. So, if all your group members have their own Google Calendars, and you create a central one for the group as well, it should be pretty easy to achieve smooth coordination.
posted by flabdablet at 12:49 AM on April 15

If you've got a spare webserver kicking around and feel comfortable installing and configuring PHP applications then Project Pier is a good open-source equivalant to Basecamp.
posted by seanyboy at 1:49 AM on April 15 [1 favorite]

Google calendar is fabulous, not only because it's user-friendly for the clueless, but because it has enough power hidden under the hood for techies: you can get a thunderbird extension to synchronize it with the lightening calendar, for example.
posted by paultopia at 9:46 AM on April 15

Meeting Wizard should let you do all that. I use it a lot and it's very straightforward.
posted by min at 9:47 AM on April 15

I didn't mark a best answer, but I'm going to check out all your suggestions and see what works best for the group. Thanks everyone!
posted by elisynn at 2:53 AM on April 16