Hi Chris,
--On November 20, 2014 at 5:32:05 AM +0000 Chris Inacio <inacio@xxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Ahh, but maybe it is.
So in the SACM group I just filled out a Doodle poll with 60 options to
create a interim meeting time. Obviously the whole SACM group is
expected to do this which is effectively copy our corporate/personal
calendar into a Doodle poll. This made me look into “is there a better
way”?
First, I would hope to think that IETF could potentially host dudle, from
TU-Dresden (https://dudle.inf.tu-dresden.de). It’s an open source tool
that allows the creation of polls just like Doodle.
Secondly, and more ambitiously, I was looking at tools like Doodle
Premium, TimeBridge, WhenIsGood, and ScheduleOnce which allow calendar
integration from user calendars (e.g. Exchange, Google, Apple Calendar,
…) and helps in scheduling.
Having tooling like that to schedule an interim meeting would be great.
There is an “Interim Meeting Manager” but you need to login to see it
- so I didn’t check it out.
FYI there is an effort underway to create a standards based calendaring
feature based on the IETF's existing iCalendar standard (RFC5545). This
effort involves a new iCalendar component type: "VPOLL" -
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-york-vpoll-02> (currently expired mostly
because authors are concentrating on the existing Calsify WG work). The
idea of VPOLL is to allow for regular scheduling messaging to convey poll
information directly to users' calendar clients so that polls can be
"overlaid" on top of their existing calendars making it easier to reply (or
even having those clients auto-respond or at least fill out likely
responses). There are already a couple of experimental implementations.
This recognizes the fact that, in spite of having the ability to lookup
free busy time sing iCalendar, the reality is that a poll-based solution is
often better and quicker at homing in on a meeting time and it makes sense
to standardize that process.
--
Cyrus Daboo