14 DAY TRIAL // Rescheduling an appointment can be a real hassle and the more people involved the harder it gets. But most people don't have a personal assistant or someone to handle this task, which results in a lot of time wasted trying to fit a meeting into everyone's schedule. Now, Google is trying to fix that with an automated rescheduler for Google Calendar.
"If you're searching for something on the web, you don't just start randomly visiting pages looking for relevant content, you use a search engine. So we decided to apply some of Google's search experience to the problem of scheduling. We experimented with using ranking algorithms to return the most relevant meeting times based on specified criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times," David Marmaros, software engineer at Google, writes.
Google applied this newly researched algorithm and created a new tool, Smart Rescheduler, it's releasing in Google Calendar Labs. Using it is relatively simple, just click on the "Find new time..." link and Google will compare the public schedules of everyone attending and try to find the best possible time for a new meeting. There are several customization options to refine the 'search' for a new time slot. These allow you to prioritize certain people, by marking some of them as optional, change the duration of the meeting, ignore certain conflicts, and so on.
Google is launching Smart Rescheduler in the recently updated Google Calendar Labs, as it didn't believe it was mature enough for a proper release. As the algorithm and the tool itself get better, it's very likely that the feature will become a permanent one in Google Calendar. If it works as 'advertised,' Smart Rescheduler should prove a very useful tool for small and large companies alike.