Google Calendar gets new meeting tool
Smart Rescheduler suggests new times for broken meetings
By Juan Carlos Perez | Published: 12:10, 19 March 2010
Google is now publicly testing a new feature for its Calendar application that auto-suggests a new time and date for a meeting that needs to be rescheduled.
Smart Rescheduler is available in the Labs section of Google Calendar, along with a list of other features that are still being evaluated.
Just as Google's search engine applies algorithms to find and rank relevant results to a query, the Smart Rescheduler evaluates a variety of variables, like invitees' time zones, appointments, meetings and conflicts, to suggest alternative times for a meeting. "It's an early-stage experiment that approaches calendaring from a search perspective," said Ken Norton, a Google Calendar product manager.
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The alternatives can be tweaked and refined manually by altering elements, like the length of the meeting and the number of attendees, Norton said.
The feature is aimed primarily at administrative assistants who are in charge of scheduling meetings with many attendees, to help them more quickly reschedule meetings. As with all products with the Google Labs label, Smart Rescheduler could change significantly as Google continues to refine it, and could even be discontinued.
