Can We Meet?

I’ve made it through the most difficult part of my journey.  Getting safely from Austin to Dallas.

You’d be surprised at how many things can go wrong between the Austin and Dallas airports.

DFW to Tokyo Narita, no problemo.  Beijing, piece of cake.  Austin to Dallas, or vice versa, God rest your weary traveling soul, anything can and often does go wrong.

You may remember the time I was coming back from somewhere (Las Vegas, I think it was) and ended up spending what should have been an unnecessary night at the DFW Hilton.

Then there was the time it took me 1 hour and 45 minutes to fly from Dallas to Austin, typically a 35-45 minute flight (although to be fair, on that particular voyage, the weather was exceptionally bad).

It’s enough to make somebody want to have better scheduling software with their messaging systems.

So the timing is perfect for the announcement IBM and Tungle made just yesterday, whereby Tungle announced the availability of its Tungle.me software for Lotus Notes.

Already, more than 20 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using Tungle.me to save time scheduling meetings, and more than half of the largest global 100 corporations use IBM’s flagship collaboration offerings, Lotus Notes and Domino.

Tungle.me makes it much simpler for people to schedule meetings across organizations, calendar systems and time zones by eliminating costly double bookings and the endless back and forth of finding a time to meet.

As Tungle CEO Marc Gingras explained, “With the introduction of Tungle.me for Lotus Notes, many millions of additional business people around the world can spend more time being productive and less time playing scheduling ping-pong.”

I like ping-pong.  The real kind.  But not the how-in-the-world-are-we-going-to-find-a-good-time-to-meet kind.

The addition of Lotus Notes means that Tungle now works with all major business- and consumer-oriented electronic calendar environments, including Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Entourage, and is also available on the iPhone and BlackBerry.

With Tungle.me for Lotus Notes you can set custom availability and synchronize it with your Lotus Notes calendar. Once meetings are scheduled, they are automatically updated in the background.

Check out the video demonstration below to see Tungle and Lotus Notes in action:

Me, I’m off to crank up on the caffeine for my short flight to Tokyo.

See you from Singapore.