Doodle Blog

Laura Stack put together some valulable tips for getting control over the time eaten up by meetings. Its worth reading!

Office Productivity: Stop the Meeting Madness

The Crunchies recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. And you get to choose who wins! So please help us win.

It’s easy, just use the badge below or click this link to access the pre-filled nomination form for Doodle as Best International Start-up. You can vote daily until Friday, Dec 4. Thank you!

Today we reached beta status with the Doodle Widget for Lotus Notes, the latest advance in helping you to expedite and gain even greater control over the scheduling process. Doodle now works with IBM Lotus Notes in addition to MS Outlook, iCal, Google and other electronic calendars. This latest seamless integration further equips organizations, small businesses and enterprises to close the gap between disparate calendars and simplify meeting coordination—enabling professionals to regain valuable time lost each week to get participants on “the same page.”

Read the full press release on Doodle’s calendar integration capabilities, use cases and screenshots.

Apply for the Doodle Widget for Lotus Notes beta version!

For the environment, in health care or in academia: project managers rely on the flexibility of Doodle when coordinating and scheduling times with a large number of people. Read their original voices!

“In ONE DAY we had nearly all of the time slots filled with volunteers — a scheduling job that would have been a nightmare the old way.” More…

Jeanne Huber, Wild Salmon Protection Project on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

“Doodle makes it simple for all of us to assemble a group of people, especially when participants use different calendar systems.” More…

Amy, a project specialist for a health care quality center in Cincinnati, Ohio

Coordinating multiple meetings for 15 committees, each made up of approximately 18 faculty members: “I couldn’t have done it any other way. Next time Doodle will again be critical to our efforts.” More…

Curriculum Manager Erin Seay at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine

Doodle published a Gadget for iGoogle almost exactly one year ago. It is used heavily and feedbacks are very positive, e.g. this one: “A simple but great plugin to see my Doodles. From the creator of Doodle himself. Cool idea and extremly useful!”

The same gadget can be used in many other places:

• In the sidebar of your Firefox browser: Visit this address, create a bookmark, edit the new bookmark’s properties and activate the “open in sidebar” checkbox, then open the bookmark.
• In your Gmail sidebar: Activate Gmail labs, enable “add any gadget by URL”, go to “Settings / Gadgets” and add the Doodle gadget (URL).
• In your Google Calendar: Activate labs for Google calendar, enable the “add any gadget by URL” gadget and use that gadget to add the Doodle gadget (URL).

Where else can it be used? Tell us in the comments!

And BTW: we also have a Facebook and a XING app. And there are other ways to integrate Doodle with Google’s and others’ calendars. Learn more.

Doodle is an online partner of LeWeb’09:

LeWeb brings together the best and the brightest people of the web industry from attendees to speakers. It is the #1 European Internet event with 1800 participant from 30 countries and takes place in Paris on Dec 9-10 2009. More info on http://www.leweb.net

Special: Use promo code DOODLE to get 10% discount on http://www.leweb.net/register.

Doodle has become so much a part of everyday business life for some organizations and businesses that the name is being used like a verb… just ask Anthony DiSabatino.

“A college friend who is into all the latest tools and technologies recommended I check out Doodle a few years ago and it was clear right way that it would save us a lot of time. The online scheduling tool is great and very easy to use—even for ‘technophobes.’ From the moment we began scheduling meetings with Doodle it caught on like wildfire in our organization at both our Delaware and Pennsylvania locations. You know it’s a good product when it becomes a verb. My colleagues and I say, ‘hey, can you Doodle to arrange a time to meet, or just Doodle me and we’ll set something up.’”

– Andrew DiSabatino III, estimator, EDiS Company

Folks like Erin Seay can’t imagine scheduling any other way…

“I relied solely upon Doodle to schedule weekly committee meetings throughout the four months it took for us to complete a part of our curriculum revision—I couldn’t have done it any other way. The tool is very easy to use; it was great for me, as the administrator, to be able to actually ‘see’ in a visual representation participants’ availabilities and who was confirmed for each meeting. Many of our faculty members were also impressed with how effortlessly we were getting the meetings scheduled—so much so that several now use Doodle for every day personal scheduling.”

Doodle enabled Ms. Seay to close the gap between everyone’s calendars and cut what would have otherwise been a laborious and time-consuming weekly scheduling process down from hours to minutes.

– Erin Seay, curriculum manager, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine

All Doodle users can now effortlessly include attachments within their meeting requests and polls – whether a meeting agenda, invitation, picture or video – thanks to the integrated new feature from the collaboration service drop.io. drop.io and Doodle have a common philosophy: collaboration with an online tool should be dead simple and possible without registration.

After a month-long test phase we can also release the integration of Google Maps. This free feature gives meeting organizers the ability to select a location for a meeting and let it display using Google Maps.

And finally, here’s some news for our enterprise Branded Doodle clients: you can now fully customize your Branded Doodle environment for internal and external use. The theming editor is only available for Branded Doodle and Premium Doodle paying customers, however, the unique URL, access control, and safety features will remain unchanged for paying Branded Doodle customers. Get the full Branded Doodle now!

You might already have recognized that Doodle has a new main page. With that brush-up, we further focus on the scheduling aspect of Doodle which made it possible to rearrange and declutter the page and make it more user-friendly. What is important: all Doodle features are still there! And speaking of features: we put together an overview of all the funtionality available in the free Doodle service. If you’re not yet familiar with all the different possibilities, you’ll see that Doodle is very flexible and can be tailored to your sepcific needs – always easily and quickly, of course!

Many thanks, dear users and fans, for the great feedback we continue to receive from you! It is an enormous source of motivation which drives us to make Doodle even better and more tailored to your needs. Today we’ve opened the blog to allow our business customers to speak about their experiences with Branded Doodle, the online scheduling enterprise solution:

Sanjay Sharma, Director of Marketing at SUN Cloud Computing:

“Employees throughout Sun Microsystems are using Doodle every day to set up meetings and even to coordinate employee participation at conferences and trade shows.”

Read more about the use case Sun Startup Essentials …

Raimar Paszehr, Head IT-Services at the University St. Gallen:

“Doodle is an ingenious way to find a common time and date for a meeting – it is the perfect complement to the calendar! The University St. Gallen purchased Branded Doodle with access control as an internal service for the staff to carry out meeting requests on our own dedicated platform.”

Martin Gafner, Head Operations at Puzzle ITC:

“Puzzle ITC has used Doodle since shortly after the service’s inception.
We are a young team that is always interested in new technologies that can simplify our workflow. That’s why each and every collaborator picks Doodle when it comes to scheduling meetings. Branded Doodle is particularly cool because our logo identifies us clearly as the originator of a poll.”

Of course, we’re always glad to receive your suggestions and ideas–we welcome any input that you may have. Thanks again.