Frequently asked questions

New: 'Own server' / 'private label' versions with advanced features! See question 8.

1. How do I register and/or pay for the service?

You don't have to: you can just use it! As we say on our About page: "100% free; 100% private; no registration; no setup; no hassle." There is no charge for the service - you can simply use it to set up and arrange meetings. There is no 'catch', i.e. it does exactly what it says; feel free to try it and to use it for arranging meetings. No registration is needed, because we have found that regisration is an annoying distraction that prevents services from being simple. If you are interested in a 'private label' version for your own company, please contact us, but otherwise you can just use the service as it is.

2. Can I schedule by hourly slots or 'evening' instead of just AM/PM or whole days?

Fine-grained timing, down to 15-minute intervals, with the same ease of use, is available in our private label version (see details). Don't forget that for many events, such as 'get-together evening dinner' or 'the 8PM book group', the time can be assumed in advance (or specified in your email invitation to participants), and thus only the date needs to be selected! Anyway, please 'stay tuned' for announcements from us.

3. I want to arrange a meeting several months in the future. Can I view only the relevant months instead of every month between now and then?

Yes, indeed: although 'multiple' months will appear on your own initial 'setup' display (purely to enable you to select your dates, using the 'Add 2 months' feature), don't worry... there's good news:

When your invited recipients see the actual response form (i.e. to tick their available dates) they will ONLY see the relevant months displayed.

4. How do I cancel a meeting?

No 'cancelling' is necessary: the 12-digit code for the meeting responses table (responses.php...) is only known to you, i.e. we don't even see this at 'Meetomatic central'. Once you've decided about the meeting, that's all there is to it. If you've changed your mind, you can just ignore the previous meeting pages and set up a fresh one.

5. Is my information kept private?

Yes it is. We are the sole owner of the information collected on this site, and we will not sell, share, rent, or give away this information to others in any way. For more information, see our privacy statement.

6. Are my meetings secure?

The meeting Web address (URL) associated with every meeting includes a 6-character random string which is unique to that meeting, and known only to the people whom you choose to invite. The meeting 'proposer' has an additional hidden URL which includes a 12-character random string for accessing the results of everyone's responses. You have additional options, if you are worried that the emails to your participants or their responses may be 'intercepted' en route:

you could request your participants to use a nickname when they fill in the form, particularly a nickname known only to you; then even an 'interceptor' would merely have found out that some anonymous person named with an alias of, say, 'Rufus93' could attend a meeting on certain dates.
if there is enough demand, we can make Meet-O-Matic available on a secure server
if there is enough demand, we can make Meet-O-Matic available for you to run on your own servers, e.g. behind your own institutions' firewalls.
you may also be interested in our private label version with extra security and custom URL... see our contact page.

7. Can I synchronize with my personal information manager or other electronic diary (including Web-based calendars)?

This is currently under investigation, but the overwhelming evidence from our empirical studies is that people prefer to 'do their own thing' rather than leave auto-synchronization in the hands of a software tool. Auto-synchronization and constraint checking is a nice idea on paper, but does not accord with psychological reality. The fundamental problem is that a software tool can never know that I would abandon very-very-important-meeting-X in favour of just-announced-and-even-more-very-very-very-important-meeting-Y, no matter how many levels of flags and options I include in my calendaring software. That is a personal decision, and is the key intuition that makes Meet-O-Matic so simple to use. Meet-O-Matic leaves the date choices personal, and puts its effort into a nice display of the people-vs-dates constraint table (and helps you manage that). If your organization has successfully deployed group synchronization tools and you can arrange meetings using it, then your particular work culture has its own successful solution which doesn't require Meet-O-Matic!

8. Can I run my own Meet-O-Matic server?

YES: if you are interested in a 'private label' version for your own company (either hosted by us with your own special subdomain or alternatively running on your own in-house servers), containing advanced features such as fine-grained scheduling (down to 15-minute intervals) and time zone management, please contact us and we can send you a quotation.