Desktop Scheduling and E-mail

We started out this section talking about ways to push-publish your content, and using an e-mail mailing list as one method. But we aren’t out of the woods yet. We’d also like to integrate e-mail with our other desktop applications and be able to send messages directly from these applications. Here is an example:

Say we are trying to schedule a meeting among five different participants, three of whom are in other cities and would have to fly in for the meeting. We could call up (or send separate e-mail) to each person, asking for dates of availability over the next week or so. That is cumbersome, time consuming and usually involves many calls or messages before we can come to a consensus on the open time slot. This sounds like a job for a computer program, and there are many now that perform this task to schedule meetings and keep track of calendars.

You’d like any program to work across your enterprise so that everyone’s calendar is visible. But you’d also like to have different levels of access to your calendar. Some of your coworkers should be able to make and change your appointments without your explicit permission: They could be your administrative assistant or department secretary. For others, you would prefer that they only view your schedule and see when you are free, but not necessarily with whom you are meeting and when.

In the ideal world, you’d like this feature as part of your e-mail software for several reasons. First, you’d like to receive notification of requests for your time through e-mail, since you order your priorities according to other e-mail messages that you receive. Second, you want to make use of the directories, address books and contact information that you maintain via e-mail. There is no sense in having to recreate or retype any of this information if you have already created it for your e-mail program. And, finally, you don’t want to have to learn how to use yet another piece of software if you can leverage functions of existing programs such as e-mail that you spend more of your time using.

Perhaps the best product for group scheduling was the IBM mainframe-based PROFS of yore. It did everything to integrate scheduling into the messaging environment. It had different levels of access so that your staff couldn’t tell you were taking the day off to play golf, but your secretary could see this. The only problem is that it cost a bundle and only ran on IBM’s big iron and proprietary mainframe networks.

Second best is Novell’s GroupWise, which runs on a variety of platforms. Whether you want to create a meeting date or create a message, you use similar tools and menu commands. As participants confirm their attendance, you receive e-mail with this information. You use the same directory for the meeting users that you have for your e-mail users.

Unfortunately, the products that we have chosen for this book don’t really help in this regard. The full version of Outlook 98 works in conjunction with Microsoft Exchange to do scheduling—but this piece is missing from the Outlook Express software. cc:Mail works in conjunction with Lotus’ Organizer group scheduling program, but you still need to use the Organizer software to set up any schedules. And Netscape has its own Calendar Server that works in conjunction with a Web browser to view meetings. Again, another interface. Both cc:Mail and Netscape products, however, make use of the existing directory entries that you have for e-mail—a small step forward.