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Tungle.me, a great calendar scheduling application I have been using for the past 3+ years, announced today that they are shutting down their service. RIM acquired them sometime back and, as many expected, they are shutting down Tungle.me. This follows RIM shutting down another service they acquired, Gist.
As of Monday, December 3rd, 2012 we will shut down the standalone Tungle service. You will continue to be able to use your Tungle.me page until then to schedule meetings and share calendars. We know our dedicated members rely on Tungle every day to manage their calendars and we don’t want to leave you out to dry, so we suggest you check out Doodle to replace Tungle in December.
Before Tungle.me, I was using Timebridge and I am now in the market shopping around for a comparable service. I thought I will post a quick post on features I like the most on Tungle.me and see if I get some recommendations for a comparable service from CloudAve readers.
The following are some of the features I expect from the alternative:
- Most critical requirement: I want fine grained control over my availability. Most of the service lets us open up the availability in blocks (like days of the week or hours of the day). Tungle.me allowed me to have fine grained control over my available hours. I might have set weekly time for meetings but on a specific day, I may want to control the available hours based on my travel or personal schedules. This was the biggest selling point for me when I signed up with Tungle.me. I haven’t come across any service that offers such comparable fine grained control.
- I am a big Google user. I would want a service that works seamless with Google calendar (both in terms of picking up my availability from there and adding the scheduled times to the calendar).
- An option to set when I close the calendar for scheduling. With Tungle.me, I have set the limit on 2 days during normal time and 12 hours during conference travels. I want similar control in the new service.
- A pretty good mobile app (both iOS and Android)
Though this was not part of Tungle.me, I would like a service that also integrates with popular online meeting services like Webex, Goto Meeting, Meeting Burner, etc..
What are the services you use for calendar scheduling? Do you know of any service that matches my needs? Thanks in advance.
Related articles
- RIM Welcomes Tungle! (blogs.blackberry.com)
- Too cool for tungle.me? (alexeymk.com)
Krishnan, good for you for stating what you want from the market! We are introducing a new solution in beta this week and I believe it meets all the needs on your list other than having native apps. However, it’s designed responsively and once we’re out of beta, those apps will be developed, so I hope we can ask for some leniency on that point.
The online scheduling platform is called Book’d (www.bookd.com). I think the most important feature to explain, in light of your most critical requirement, is how availability is managed. Book’d will not expose someone’s calendar in the way that Tungle does. Instead, each person can offer multiple types of custom “services” (i.e. Internal meetings, consulting, client meetings, etc.). Availability is then scoped to a service, along with duration, locations (can have multiple, which can be physical and/or virtual) and pricing (free is fine, too). You can manage general availability within the service management, but you can also always block additional time on your calendar, if needed.
So, instead of a person landing on a page and seeing your full availability, they will see a landing page with various types of appointments they can schedule with you. Let’s say you offer Cloud Infrastructure Consulting, as an example. You’ve designated that you offer that service on Mondays and Tuesday from 4 to 7 p.m. in 45 minute increments with 15 minute buffers in-between appointments for $125. You offer this service virtually through Skype and in one physical location (maybe while attending conferences, you add additional locations, too). A user would be able to click on that service and then select location and date/time based on what you have scoped specifically for that service.
We’re calling this controlled availability. You, as the account holder, have complete control over your schedule and people are then able to book in ways that ensure better schedule management, especially in light of today’s competing professional and personal priorities.
To learn more about how we compare to Tungle, you can read our blog post here: http://schedulingsoftware.tumblr.com/post/31800235342/replacing-tungle-me
We’d love for you and your readers to try Book’d out, Krishnan!
I’m in the same boat. I use and love Tungleme.
I’m a recruiter, so this is a great tool for candidates to go in, see when I’m available, and schedule a time to talk to me without the usual back and forth that goes along with scheduling interviews.
I’ll keep my eye on Bookd.com, hopefully I can use it for my needs as well.
When I hear of the news today about Tungle, I did create an account on Doodle, but I can’t seem to make it sync with my Outlook calendar, so the availablity is inaccurate.
Thanks,
Debbie
Absolutely. It’s removed the need to have a PA for a long time. Thank you for documenting so clearly what needs it addressed.
Same here, I jumped to Doodle’s MeetMe but it is less than bare bone BASIC, it lacks a lot of basic features you would expect from an online calendar to make it a reliable Tungle.me replacement:
1. No micro-management of details as mentioned above (which is huge in-and-of-iteself; you can’t block start and end times during business hours. The result, the online calendar show me as “available” 24/7!
2. Tungle.me allowed end-users to automatically book appointments; with Doodle, I have to manually confirm all appointments, but I first have to login to Doodle first then confirm.
3. Only end-users can cancel appointments once you have confirmed the appointment. I, the administrator and calendar owner, am SOL the moment that I confirm the appointment. Once I confirm an appointment, I can’t cancel the appointments!
4. When the end-user (customer) cancels the appointment, Doodle sends me the cancellation notification by email, but it’s not removed from my Doodle calendar to free up the time block. The “ghost appointment” remains online via Doodle’s online calendar as “busy.” If I remove the appointment from my Outlook calendar, the supposedly cancelled appointment time block syncs back into my Outlook calendar via Doodle’s Outlook sync tool.
5. Doodle’s online calendar does not automatically send email reminders to customers.
I could go on, but these are the biggies concerning Doodle. I too am shopping for an alternative to Tungle.me and would love to find a calendar with similar options and free?
Thanks.
Oh, by the way, 6. Direct two-way automatic sync between Outlook and the online calendar would be nice!
We’re glad that they will be living on within RIM and we are looking forward to BlackBerry 10!
We’d also like to welcome Tungle users who wish to continue with a stand-alone offering. TimeTrade is offering 1 year of free service to existing Tungle users. Give us a try – you can sign up at:
http://www.timetrade.com/tungle
I signed up for a trial of timetrade, but don’t see it as being a true alternative to Tungle, as I don’t see a nice, customized URL that I can post to my profile for people to schedule a time with me without me inviting them first. Am I missing something?
Also, it’s extremely slow to engage with the browsers.
For those looking for a professional alternative – ScheduleOnce (www.scheduleonce.com) is the best alternative to Tungle.
Pretty near. Hope you folks bring in embedding feature.