Doodle Blog

We launched our first Outlook Plugin in March 2009 at the same time as the calendar connect via ICS feeds. Today, we are happy to open to the public the new Outlook Connector beta that fully integrates with the calendar view launched one month ago.

Outlook users can now start and answer meeting invitations directly in the calendar view and automatically reserve tentative and definitive events in their calendar. It is your choice whether to connect full calendar details or only free and busy data with Doodle. On top of that, you can share free and busy data with select contacts via Doodle – this is particularly useful for individuals who don’t share a calendar infrastructure. You can also connect your address book so you don’t have to manually type e-mail addresses when sending meeting invitations via Doodle.

Connect your Outlook Calendar today! You’ll need Outlook 2007 or 2010 and a free MyDoodle account. The previous Outlook Plugin is not going to be supported beyond end of August.

Here are two more nice little improvements for the calendar view:

• When you start a meeting invitation in the calendar view, all time slots you select will by default be the same length as the previous one. So it’s just a click, not a drag, for all consecutive option slots.
• Doodle will remember the calendars you selected and will show them by default when working in the calendar view the next time.

The “closed beta” phase of the Doodle Outlook Connector was short and positive: we have heard from a large number of interested users who provided us with so much valuable feedback that we’re now able to open the beta to all users. We’d like to thank all of the early participants!

Be sure to also check out the video and additional information about the new calendar connect and view functionality.

The new face of Doodle is out now: a calendar view that enables users to directly start and answer meeting requests with all relevant information up to date at one place. You can connect your personal calendar, as well as any additional calendar via an ICS feed. This can be the family agenda, a colleague’s calendar or a public feed with national holidays. Finally, you can share free and busy data on Doodle with selected persons – regardless of the calendar system they use – and make it available with a click.

The new functions will be fully available for Google Calendar. Other online calendars like Yahoo!, Windows Live, and Apple’s MobileMe can be connected using ICS feeds from and to Doodle. Rollout of the Outlook Connector will start with a private beta phase initially and soon be opened as a public beta.

People who organize their events without electronic calendar can still use the common mode with the tabular display, also when a meeting request was sent from the calendar view. Users can also switch between the calendar view and the classic tabular display.

Read more in our media release or connect your calendar today (see also the short video)!

With our latest release, we proudly took the Doodle for Lotus Notes widget out of beta status. Lotus Notes users can now take full advantage of the seamless Doodle-integration: Doodle-polls can be initiated and replied to directly from Lotus Notes and the meeting time agreed on can be saved with one click in the calendar.

By integrating Doodle into Lotus Notes, we have given a tremendous number of organizations, including small businesses and large enterprises, the means to close the gap between disparate calendars and to make scheduling virtually effortless. Michael Snijders from Chocolats Camille Bloch SA, one of the earliest adopters of the widget, said:

This is an excellent widget. Finally, we can use the full power of Lotus Notes which allows us to schedule our meetings internally, and with the rest of the world! I initially began using Doodle for private meet-ups, but now I’m able to use it professionally as well.

Learn more on the Lotus Notes widget or Doodle’s further calendar integrations!

We’ve improved the way Doodle integrates into Google Calendar. If you use Google Calendar, you can get the following features:

• When you participate in a poll, Doodle will suggest how to fill in the poll based on the information in your Google Calendar. You can also choose examine the relevant calendar information.
• You will have the option to automatically add tentative appointments to your Google calendar for all the time slots that you accept on Doodle.
• Once the final date and time is fixed, Doodle will remove the tentative appointments and add the final date and time to the calendar.

In summary, the new integration adds new functionality and is considerably faster and more reliable than the old way. And it takes only a second to set it up: Go to your MyDoodle settings and click “Connect new Google Calendar”, confirm, done. If you don’t have a (free!) MyDoodle account yet, register here now.

MyDoodle settings to integrate into third-party calendars