#shared calendars

Features Needed intrusive a Shared Calendar<\p>

You don’t need a personal assistant to manage your schedule -- you need the right tool for the job. At Weld, we’re building that tool just for you -- learning your preferences and giving you smart action buttons to help you get stuff done.

Weld is a free and easy tool for handle scheduling appointments that you can use to skip the back and forth with shared availability and smart action buttons. You save time and money when scheduling with Weld.

Download Weld for iOS today!

When you receive an email request to meet, quickly view your schedule, reply, or simply add the event to your calendar in just one tap.

                                    P.S. At Weld, we’re constantly looking to improve your experience -- we’ll be adding a new feature that lets you simply tap and add a location to your meeting from your common event locations or add a new one.

You don't need another calendar app

The calendar apps do a great job of reminding you of appointments and where you need to be. But they miss the important difficult task of actually scheduling and putting something in the books. You need something to help make this back and forth easy.

Some people hire a personal assistant, subscribe to a “virtual” scheduling middleman, but we’ve built Weld (which is FREE), to make it easy for you to manage your time and coordinate with friends, colleagues, and customers.

Historically on desktop and mobile, the actions required to agree on a time and then put an event on your calendar requires quite a bit of elbow grease. With Weld, minimize the back and forth (see how this works in our previous post) with Weld’s Shared Availability.

A few weeks ago, we teased our new approach towards dealing with scheduling emails by making it natural and fast to have conversations about meeting details on your iPhone. Today, we are excited to release Weld to you!

Here's what to expect:

                                          A curated inbox with meeting requests and at-a-glance information for each conversation

A clean conversation view where you can read the back and forth messages

                                            In-line action buttons within the conversation view so you can act quickly (add event to calendar, propose a time to meet, see shared availability)

Dynamic event status updates with the ability to edit and propose if something comes up

                                            Shared availability calendar allows you to pick the right time for both people, the first time

Simply tap on the date and time, change the event duration by extending the block, and propose!

According to a recent study by Flurry, the US consumer spends an average of 2:42 hours on their mobile device per day AND app usage accounts for 86% of that time. With the increase in time spent on mobile and the significant shift in productivity app usage, it’s safe to say that we are excited to get stuff done on mobile.

By spending more time on mobile, we want and expect our smartphones to be just as useful and have the same powerful capabilities as our laptops and desktops. But it is still in the early days for getting stuff done on mobile.

Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook work great on desktop by offering shared availability -- a feature that allows users to share and view schedules to makes scheduling a breeze. However, both have failed to bring this crucial feature to mobile.

Current calendar apps focus on reminding you of your many meetings and keeping you on track. But none focus on the problem of coordinating a new meeting or event and getting that on your calendar.

Weld brings you the best parts of the desktop scheduling experience like shared availability, combines it with an easy way to complete a task on your phone, and communicate about your schedule. With shared availability, you can see when your colleagues, customers, and friends are free to meet. With inline ‘action’ buttons, you can confirm your availability, add the meeting to the calendar, and send a reply directly without ever having to leave the app. Finally!

When we sat down to work on scheduling, we realized one of the trickiest parts is dealing with multiple time zones. Finding a time shouldn’t require arithmetic. Adding a few hours, subtracting a couple -- it all just became too confusing.

With Weld, you don’t have to worry about taking different time zones into account.

Here's what to expect if you're in New York and setting up some time with a colleague in California:

                                    When you pull up the calendar, you’re shown your schedule AND when your colleague is busy. This makes it easy to suggest a time when you are both free. Looks like 10:00 AM EST is open.

                                    What your colleague will see is that you suggested a time at 7:00 AM PST. Weld automatically converts the time for you.

Start saving time and reduce the back and forth when you schedule.

Problem: Want to view multiple or shared Google Calendars on iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch.

We received earlier this week an inquiry about cloud tools to be used within a team on a corporate level: 

The staff is currently using Dropbox to organize spreadsheets and documents on the cloud. It has some distinct drawbacks and I wondered if you had heard of any other service that might be useful. As additional locations are opened it will be useful for all members of mgmt to have access to data as soon as it is prepared. It would also be helpful to have a cloud based scheduling tool so that important meetings were not overlooked. Have you heard of any services that might be helpful? 

Our answer: 

We find that GoogleApps provides a considerable amount of collaboration tools for corporations. You can set-up a domain name with Google: ie. "YourCompany.com," and have all your staff members as users with e-mail address, document/spreadsheets & forms collaboration, sharing of contacts & contact groups and common calendars shared over the whole domain. This should give you a great start organizing your Google Drive - the newest Google Cloud service - and integrate seamlessly with GoogleApps for Business. 

You can read more about it on GoogleApps for Business website.

With Google providing an open environment for developers, there is additional software available to integrate with GoogleApps services for the rest of the business, be it CRMs, bookkeeping, project management or scheduling. 

A cute Google Apps Market Place video by Google

We also find that providing an internal network and own email server has become increasingly cost-prohibitive, when battling connectivity issues, anti-virus & spam fighting as well as hardware maintenance and the constant need for performance and security issues. 

Access to email over various platforms, (desktop, laptop, mobile, tablets) has its own synchronization problems, which do not arise when working with Google Apps. The Android and iOs apps are state of the art. 

We have used Google Apps for the last four years with various organizations and within our own corporations. Especially for Relevanza, the collaboration on documents for our publishing needs has been an invaluable streamlining tool which reduces clutter in our inbox. Commenting can be done directly on the document without sending the files back and forth. The revision control and the real-time multi-user editing is handled well over the InternWebs.