Doodle Blog

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 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.

A new product for Doodle lovers is now available, Premium Doodle: a personal profile that allows you to express your individuality when scheduling. Premium Doodle gives scheduling a whole new identity – yours! You can customize all your Doodle polls with your own colors and add your profile picture which will appear whenever you participate in a poll. For a fee of just $28 annually all polls you initiate and participate in will be ad-free. Premium functionality will also allow you to request personal information such as postal address, e-mail address, and phone number from poll participants – particularly helpful for binding RSVPs. We’re looking forward to welcoming Premium Doodle customers and thank them for the support they give us through it!

Get Premium Doodle now or read more!

Read the media release.

Update August 3 2009: Doodle implements 3 improvements for the XING app

Doodle is launch partner of the new XING Partner Ecosystem. Being a social network, XING enables a number of interesting functions: XING members can recognize Doodle polls they have in common with others, they see the profile picture when someone participates in a poll, and they can invite XING contacts to a meeting with just one click. Starting today, Doodle can be easily installed as a XING application.

Picok is an open source “Personal Information Cockpit” built by LIIP. The latest version (1.0.1) added support for Doodle portlets. Read more about Picok on their web site: www.picok.ch

Picok Screenshot

Wow! Murphy hit us hard today. Two of our servers failed simultaneously. Other — non-related – problems made us hunt down the wrong causes for a while. In the end, Doodle was not available for quite some time today. We apologize for the downtime and the inconvience this has caused.

Here’s the good news:

• All systems are back online.
• There was no data loss whatsoever.
• We have used this opportunity to add another server and to optimize a number of system parameters to make sure that Doodle will run even more reliably and responsively in the future.
• We have contingency plans for a number of scenarios in place, and it’s reassuring to see that they work. We’ll just have to be even faster next time.