New features in Doodle connect world's most popular online scheduling tool with all major calendar systems
– Simple scheduling tool frees users to focus on core business activities -
3 March, 2009 – London and Zurich – Doodle, the popular Web 2.0 scheduling tool, has announced exciting new features for consumers and business users, which mean that its “polls,” or tabulated meeting requests, will further extinguish the common time-burner of scheduling meetings.
• Calendar integration
In Doodle's biggest technology advancement to date, the Doodle Outlook Plugin brings together the most popular scheduling service with the widest-used calendar system on the market. Outlook users can use the plugin to automatically fill in Doodle polls and to book tentative and final slots in their calendar. See here for more:
http://doodle.com/about/DoodleOutlookPlugin.html. On top of this, the cutting-edge MyDoodle ICS Calendar feed will connect Doodle to all other major calendars like Google Calendar, Sunbird, or Mac’s iCal and keep users updated on the state of their Doodle polls.
• Branded Doodle - three new products
The new Branded Doodle service enables organisations to purchase their own private Doodle, hosted by Doodle with their logo and name. Three products are available: the free option is ads-supported. The ads-free option is priced at a flat rate of £15 per month. For an additional £15, the security option encrypts all traffic to the Doodle servers with SSL. Regardless of which product they choose, customers are able to set up Branded Doodle in a matter of minutes with an easy-to-use online wizard.
http://doodle.com/about/BrandedDoodle.html.
• Doodle Mail Init Agent
The Doodle Mail Init Agent allows users to create a new poll via email rather than the Web. Users can send an email to Doodle's email agent, which parses the mail's content, sets up a new poll accordingly and sends back the link to the new poll. The agent recognises dates and times in all possible formats, in both English and German, making the service as user-friendly as possible. For example, versions of today's date understood by the service include 'Tue', 'Tuesday', '3', '3rd', 'Mar 3rd' or '3/3'. To give it a try, send an email to
[email protected] -- the agent will answer with the instructions.
• Enhanced poll lifecycle
Until now, after creating a poll and having received the answers from all participants, the poll initiator would have to send a confirmation email with the selected time. This latest product release will now allow the initiator to close a poll and let Doodle show participants the preferred option on the corresponding web page. See here for more:
http://doodle.com/blog/english/2009/02/27/closing-polls-and-picking-the-final-date-and-time/.
“The choice of a calendar is a very personal one. That is why – in addition to the Outlook Plugin – we decided to provide a generic calendar feed which works with most modern calendar solutions,” said Doodle CEO, Michael Näf. “Branded Doodle gives our business users the possibility to schedule their meetings with their external (or internal) partners, customers, or employees with a professional look and feel that is associated with their own brand. Together with the mail agent and enhanced poll lifecycle we continue to work hard to make scheduling easy for our rapidly growing user base."
