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Meeting planner software for the rest of us:

Use a simple web form, email participants, visually juggle constraints, presto: the precise opposite of all the meeting scheduling software that no one uses! 100% free; 100% private; no registration; no setup; no hassle.

Meet-O-Matic is a meeting planning application with a difference you can experience for yourself in 2 minutes, with no registration ever required. Most workgroup software (groupware) to deal with schedule, diary, timetable and meeting constraint problems lies unused after the first few meeting scheduling experiences. Meet-O-Matic (Meetomatic) is a meeting scheduler that does not constrain participants to share a common diary or even to use a common platform - you can propose and schedule meetings online and invite participants using your own email system, then monitor responses to your meeting invitation as they arrive and are displayed in Meet-O-Matic's intuitive visual constraint table. With this table you can perform a powerful what-if scenario analysis and home in quickly on the best dates.

Our philosophy: why yet another meeting scheduling application

If you've spent time scheduling or arranging meetings, you will know that the task typically involves some tricky moments trying to satisfy everyone's constraints and to converge on a schedule that works. Often you end up playing 'telephone tag' or 'email tag' trying to chase individuals. Even if you use modern diary/meeting management workgroup or scheduling software, things can still become unstuck if one or two individuals don't use the meeting scheduling software properly (or don't use such scheduling software at all). Our research into human computer interaction, psychology and intelligent agents has suggested six fundamental principles underlying the creation of good diary management/meeting scheduling software:

1. Autonomy: People often prefer to 'do their own thing' (e.g. arrange circumstances to attend or avoid a specific meeting), rather than delegating responsibility to another person or a software tool.
2. Different tools: You cannot count on everyone you intend to invite to a meeting to use the same single diary/meeting software, or even software that 'interoperates' (communicates seamlessly) with your own.
3. Least common denominator: You can, however, safely assume that the overwhelming majority of people you want to invite probably have access to Internet email and a web browser.
4. Familiarity: People like to work with software tools they already know.
5. Speed: People will often pick up the phone or send a conventional email rather than wait for a new software tool to help them, even if that tool looks innovative and promising. Reason? The old tried-and-tested methods feel faster!
6. Granularity: For meetings that involve many possible dates or many people, the real problem is homing in on dates or AM/PM slots at a coarse-grained level in order to obtain a first-pass solution, rather than fussing about the precise time. In fact, a first-pass solution to a very complex scheduling problem provides such a large immediate payoff that it guarantees reuse of meeting scheduling software, even if only a few times per year. It also encourages a simple and speedy user interaction. Fine-grained timing, down to 15-minute intervals, with the same ease of use, is available in our private label version (see details).

With these principles in mind, we have designed Meet-O-Matic so that you can deal with the constraints of arranging meetings, especially large meetings, in a manner that is most suitable for you. Only three steps are involved, as described in the Quick Start page and illustrated with screen snapshots in the Tour.

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