Email and calendars. Email is, unsurprisingly,  still the most important mobile app. According to Forrester, 87 percent of smartphone workers use email on their devices (which leaves me wondering what other 13 percent use their smartphones for), and collectively, they do 32 percent of their email on a smartphone. While most smartphones come with their own email and calendaring tools most users will use, there are some third-party options worth considering:

• Gmail and Google Calendar. If you use Gmail, it’s worth noting that the mobile-optimized versions of the Gmail and Google Calendar sites are pretty good. They are fast and have a great UI, and one of the advantages of using them is that you can seamlessly switch from device to device without having to set up IMAP details in your various devices’ email clients.
• Touchdown. Brings superb Microsoft Exchange support to Android devices.

Document-based collaboration. Mobile workers need to be able to access their documents while out of the office on any of their devices. Cloud-based document collaboration tools need to include mobile access to be truly effective.

• Documents to Go. Dataviz’s Documents to Go is a popular mobile document editing app. It’s available for a variety of platforms, including iOS, BlackBerry, Android and Palm. When combined with a cloud file sync service like Dropbox or box.net, it enables users to access and edit their documents no matter where they are.
• Soonr. Soonr is a cloud-based document sync service. However, it also offers integrated MS Office document editing capabilities , which means users don’t need to use a separate app like Documents to Go.

Web conferencing. According to Forrester, 18 percent of information workers and 34 percent of senior staff use web conferencing at least weekly. Mobile access means being able to attend meetings even while away from the laptop.

• Fuze Meeting. Fuze Meeting’s impressive service is accessible with mobile devices. Its new Telepresence Connect service can extend traditional room-based telepresence to iPads and Android tablets.
• Join.me. LogMeIn’s simple and easy-to-use web conferencing app is accessible through iOS and Android apps.

Activity streams. Forrester thinks activity streams are becoming a critical resource for organizations that work collectively: sales teams, project teams, and executive staff, for example. Mobile support is crucial as it enables workers to stay updated no matter where they are.

• Yammer. Yammer is a popular enterprise social networking tool very much like a private Facebook for the enterprise. It offers mobile support though mobile apps available for a variety of platforms.
• Socialtext. Socialtext is another enterprise social networking and collaboration app that offers activity streams. It offers mobile support via an optimized version of the website.

Presence and chat. Knowing whether a colleague is available or not is a killer feature when out of the office. While this category of app lags today, Forrester expects adoption to accelerate. These types of features are often also often included in other mobile collaboration tools.

• eBuddy. A multi-protocol mobile chat app that supports AIM , ICQ, Google Talk, Yahoo! and MSN Windows Live Messenger within a single interface. It’s available via a native client for Android and iPhone and there’s also a mobile-optimized website.
• IM+. Another popular “all-on one” IM app that supports a variety of protocols, including AIM, iChat, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo, ICQ, Jabber, Google Talk, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and Skype Chat, and works on a number of different mobile platforms.

Social collaboration. In this category, Forrester includes access to internal blogs, wikis, community sites, and social networks from a tablet or smartphone. Mobile access allows every professional will remain connected and part of the collaborative process.

• IBM Lotus Connections. IBM’s social suite is supported on a range of mobile platforms, including Android, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry and Nokia.
• Jive Software. Jive Software’s enterprise social suite provides mobile  access though apps for iPhone and BlackBerry.

Expertise location. Forrester says this type of application is on the rise as firms look for ways to make mobile employees productive by helping them identify experts from anywhere. This type of app brings together presence, notifications, social profiles and data from HR. Many social business tools provide this kind of functionality, including:

• IBM Lotus Connections
• Jive Software
• Yammer
• Socialtext

Video conferencing. Skype has some 170 million active monthly users, and 39 percent of those people use Skype for work. Web conferencing vendors are also adding video to their products. Due to heavy resource requirements, there are few multi-party mobile video conferencing apps, though.

• Skype. Skype provides video calling for mobile platforms including iPhone and Android.
• Fring. One of the first apps to bring four-way video calls to the iPad, Fring provides native mobile apps for a variety of platforms, and also has mobile browser access.

Personally, I’m not convinced expertise location is really a “must-have” category of mobile collaboration app just yet. Do you agree with Forrester’s categories of “must-have” apps, and which apps do you recommend for each category?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Yagan Kiely

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Appointment slots are shown on a booking page, which you can embed on a website or share with colleagues or clients. People visiting that page will then have their own personal calendar overlaid over the available appointment slots and can click to book a time; a shared calendar event is then created for both users.

Here’s a short screencast showing how to set up appointment slots and how the booking process works:

Google Calendar’s appointment slots are easy to use and should greatly streamline the process of booking appointments, eliminating email back-and-forth. However, unlike dedicated meeting scheduling tools like TimeTrade, Tungle and Setster, which also offer this kind of appointment-booking functionality but only require the person advertising their availability to sign up for the app, Google’s feature requires both the person broadcasting their availability and the person booking the appointment to use Google Calendar. So while appointment slots will probably be very useful within companies where everyone is using Google Apps, it’s not going to be suitable for, say, a personal trainer offering appointment bookings on a publicly accessible website.

Note: While I have access to the appointment slots feature on my Google Apps account, I don’t yet see it on my personal Google Calendar, so it may be that it hasn’t been rolled out to all users yet.

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That’s the idea behind Noteleaf. The service has just been in operation for a couple of months, having received funding from Y Combinator, but Noteleaf is already adding features. As of today, its SMS notifications will include some new data:

• Participants’ last three tweets, plus links to their Twitter feeds. Twitter handles are retrieved from LinkedIn profiles, but the actual tweets are pulled directly from Twitter.
• A list of connections you share with each participant.

Some of Noteleaf’s features will sound familiar to Gist users, which we’ve written about several times. But Noteleaf’s co-founder Jake Klamka assures me that the company isn’t interested in competing with Gist or Plaxo; rather, he and his colleagues want to maintain a service that’s extremely simple to use, and requires no special apps or changes of behavior. Indeed, it’s likely that once users sign up for the service, they’ll hardly ever need to visit Noteleaf’s website again.

The signup process is very simple indeed. Authenticate your Gmail or Google Apps account through OAuth, do the same with your LinkedIn account, and (optionally) provide your cellphone number for delivery of text messages, and that’s it. If you don’t have a U.S. or Canadian cellphone, Noteleaf will insert the information about meeting participants into your calendar’s notes.

At the moment, Noteleaf’s notifications only work for meetings scheduled through the web interface of Google Calendar or Google Apps Calendar (only the primary calendars are recognized). And it helps if you’ve had Gmail or Google Apps email exchanges with the participants before the meeting. But Noteleaf plans to expand the services with which it’s compatible.

Meanwhile, though, Noteleaf’s extreme simplicity should appeal to teams that coordinate meetings using Google Calendar. The service is currently free while it’s in beta; the developers are considering a freemium model in the future.

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Customize Your Calendar

Like most apps, GCal isn’t “one size fits all”. You can customize several elements to make the calendar fit your needs. Here are some settings you can change:

• Custom views. By default, GCal gives you the following views: Day, Week, and Month. The day and week views can be too short for some, while the month view can be too long for others. You can create a custom calendar view by going to Settings > Custom View and select anything from two days to four weeks.
• Multiple timezones. Since most web workers have professional contacts all over the globe, it might be a good idea to include multiple timezones in your calendar. Just remember that you need to use the Day or Week views to see the timezones compared side-by-side.
• Aesthetics. Apart from the color of each calendar you set up, you can’t really change much of the visuals within GCal itself. Here are some alternative ways to change the calendar’s look and layout:
  • Helvetical. For a minimalist calendar design, you can install Ad Taylor’s Helvetical user script which gives GCal a simpler, cleaner look. If you’re working with a small monitor or a netbook, keep in mind that the large Helvetical header may lessen your usable screen area.
  • Better GCal. This add-on by Gina Trapani is handy for netbook users, as it allows you to collapse the header and the right sidebar, which is handy if you want to install some GCal gadgets but can’t afford to have them hog your screen. It also comes with a sleek gray skin for your GCal interface. I can’t seem to get some of the other features to work, though.

Use Your Calendar as a To-do List

This may seem like common sense — after all, many people use Google Calendar to record their tasks. But my approach helps to keep me organized and gives me a sense of accomplishment.

I created a new calendar and named it “Done”. Whenever I’m finished with an item on my list, I simply transfer it to the “Done” calendar. This calendar is hidden, so if I do all my assigned tasks for the day, my agenda for the day becomes clear and empty, giving me the same feeling of accomplishment when I achieve Inbox Zero.

To add a bit of fun, I uploaded a background image so that when my schedule clears, I can see the word “Done!” for that day (see screenshot below).You can upload your own image for this purpose via Settings > General > Calendar Background.

Use GCal an an Appointment Scheduler

It’s easy to book appointments with Google Calendar if your clients and colleagues have Google accounts, but what if they don’t? Some third-party tools can help:

• Darrell reviewed ScheduleOnce a few months ago, and the Firefox add-on can be found here.
• Earlier this month, Simon brought our attention to the Setster widget, which you can set up on your web site for appointment booking. You can integrate this with your Google Calendar.

Use GCal For Invoicing

If you want to use Google Calendar for invoicing, you can do so with Google Calendar Invoice Creator, a free Adobe Air application. To see how it works, check out the review and tutorial that Thursday wrote. gTime is a similar application, but you only need your web browser to use it.

GCal + Google Docs + Gmail = Collaboration

Apart from just scheduling meetings, you can also use a combination of GCal, Google Docs and Gmail for minimalist project management. The calendar sharing option makes this possible.

Here’s an example: When there’s a new design project for my team, I add a new event on our shared calendar and invite them all to it. I’ve enabled the “Attach Google Docs” feature from Google Calendar Labs, so I have the option of adding a design brief that everyone can refer to (see screenshot below). Unlike using Google Docs by itself, this allows you to attach group-wide email reminders and deadlines to your files. Just remember to share both the calendar and the file.

Also, if you need to add a calendar item while reading your email, simply click on the “More Actions” button, then “Create Event”. Gmail Labs also has Google Calendar and Google Docs gadgets for your sidebar if you need to refer to them often in one interface.

Integrating these three apps isn’t necessary if you already have existing, more robust collaboration software. But if your team is hesitant to use new tools or if you can’t afford to pay extra fees, this simple freebie approach is worth a try.

Search for Past Events

The search function is Google Calendar’s simplest and most overlooked feature. It comes in handy if you want to know the last time you did something, whether it’s a maintenance task for your car, cleaning up your hard drive, or sending greeting cards to your clients. Google’s own Matt Cutts uses this feature to keep track of his haircuts.

How do you use Google Calendar? Do you customize it in any way to suit your needs?

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The idea is simple: If you’re already keeping track of the hours it takes you to work on specific projects in Google Calendar, the invoice creator can use the RSS feed from your calendar to automatically create invoices from your tracked hours. It’s easiest if you have a separate calendar for each project — rather than keeping all your projects and appointments on one calendar — but adding a new calendar to Google Calendar is a simple process.

Google Calendar Invoice Creator uses the titles of your specific “appointments” to group hours onto invoices for each project. It’s important to consistently use the same project names to keep your invoices updating correctly. As the application receives new information, it calculates the total hours you’ve worked on each project and generates an invoice for that project. You can create your invoices as either text or HTML files. In the HTML version of your invoices, you can control the layout for a more professional look. You can also create a summary report of how you’ve been spending your time.

There is certain information you’ll want to add to the system before you start creating invoices, like your hourly rate and your client’s details. Once that information is in the system, the application will be able to turn out invoices with minimal effort on your part. You can just attach individual invoices to an email in order to pass them along to the appropriate client.

There are some drawback to using Google Calendar Invoice Creator: It’s meant for just one user, so if you’re trying to generate invoices based on several people’s hours, it’s probably not the best option. Similarly, billing different tasks at different rates can be a bit tricky. More complex invoicing applications do have more features, such as the ability to send invoices directly from the application, and easy availability from any computer. It is also worth noting that this application is not an official Google product.

On the plus side, Google Calendar Invoice Creator can run on a variety of operating systems. It doesn’t take long to learn to use, unlike many more robust bookkeeping applications. As long as you’ve already figured out Google Calendar — not a difficult learning curve — coming to grips with Invoice Creator is easy. It’s also free to download and use. If you’re in need of a quick tool to crank out invoices, this application can be quite useful.

What invoicing tools do you use?

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If you’re running Office 2003 or Office 2007 and you can’t wait for Office Web, there are some applications available that can help you get your Microsoft Office data into the cloud, via Google Apps or Zoho Business. These applications can give you piece of mind that your data is backed up and accessible anywhere, and can also help you test the waters for a full migration to a web office suite.

Syncing Applications
While syncing can be a somewhat of a dark art (even with established applications, getting your data to sync properly can be tricky), here is a roundup of some of the more popular syncing apps:

• Google Calendar Sync lets you sync your Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook calendar data. Unfortunately, Google Calendar Sync does not yet support Google Tasks.
  
• Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook let you sync Microsoft Outlook email, contacts, and calendar with Google Applications Premier Edition. Unfortunately, installing Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook disables the ability to search Outlook data.

Microsoft Office Add-Ins and Windows Applications
There are a number of Microsoft Office add-ins that enable you to move your Microsoft Office data to the cloud, including:

• Zoho Plugin for Microsoft Office enables you to access and edit Zoho documents and spreadsheets offline using Microsoft Office. You can also publish local documents to to the cloud via  Zoho Share.
  
• WebWorkerDaily covered OffiSync, which allows you to use Google Docs file storage and collaboration from a Microsoft application toolbar.
• Google Docs Uploader is a simple Windows application that enables you to upload Office documents to Google Docs using a simple drag-and-drop interface. You need to be running the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or higher.
  

Hosted Applications
Moving your Microsoft Office data into the cloud doesn’t necessarily mean using Google Apps or Zoho Business. We covered the launch of Microsoft Online Services, which provides hosted SharePoint and Exchange services. I like the thought of Exchange and SharePoint hosted in the cloud, although my experience with SharePoint hosted through third parties has been less than favorable. As Online Services is hosted by Microsoft, I’m hoping it will provide a better experience. Microsoft Online Services makes these services more accessible to freelancers and small- to medium-sized businesses that lack the personnel and resources normally required to run them.

Applications for Neglected Mac Users
I count myself as one of the Mac users stuck in Microsoft Office. As Darrell Etherington wrote about on TheAppleBlog, Mac users are going to have to wait for the Office 2010 goodness. However, there  are some third-party applications available that can help put your Office data into the cloud while you are waiting:

• Spanning Sync can sync iCal and Address Book with Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts.
• MobileMe can sync Microsoft Office data from Office on the Mac to the cloud. Unfortunately, I encountered way too many issues with MobileMe after its amateurish launch so I didn’t renew my account. Apple tried to be everything to everybody and stumbled when it came to cloud computing; my plan is to revisit MobileMe in a year to see if Apple has gotten its act together. MobileMe is a fee-based service.
• GDocsUploader, previously covered by WebWorkerDaily, is nothing more than a small applet that enables you to upload documents to Google Docs via a drag-and-drop interface.

Can Microsoft Office and Web Offices Coexist?
While these third-party and vendor applications, add-ins and services may seem like a rag-tag bunch, they do build a case for coexistence of the desktop-bound Microsoft Office and the various web office suites, although sometimes there are incompatibility problems. I’m hopeful that the interaction between Office 2010 and its web components will provide a smooth round trip for my documents from Microsoft Office on my desktop to Office Web, without the file compatibility issues from using third parties.

How do you use Office with the cloud?

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Here is the current lineup of hacks and extensions available in Calendar Labs:

Background image. Enabling this feature lets you choose a background image for your Google Calendar. You can choose which image to use from your General Settings page.

Attach Google Docs. This feature lets you attach a document, spreadsheet, and or presentation you create in Google Docs to any event you create in Google Calendar. You must share the documents you attach to a Google Calendar event in order for others to view them. If you are on a project team that uses Google Docs then this could be a very useful feature as you will able to attach media agendas and other project documentation directly to a Google Calendar event for review by the team.

World clock. This Labs feature places a reconfigurable world clock on the right-hand side of Google Calendar, with adjustable settings that let you choose the World times you want to appear in your calendar view. With many colleagues spread out across the world, I set up World Clock on my Google Calendar so I can get a better appreciation of my colleagues’ time zones.

Jump to date. Enabling this Labs feature lets you jump to any date with ease.

Next meeting. This feature provides a countdown to your next Google Calendar event.

Free or busy. Enabling this Labs feature lets you view which of your friends are free or busy (note: you and all your friends must share your Google Calendars in order for it to work). If you are on a project team where members use Google Calendar, this experimental feature should come in handy to help better communicate everybody’s availability for conference calls and meetings.

What features do you want to see join Google Calendar Labs?

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If I believed the hype from all of these scheduling services, I’d have to assume that we were all just careening around haphazardly, making and breaking so many appointments and meetings that we lose all sense of time and date. In practice, I think that most of the time the most scheduling software I need is my iPhone and its built-in Calendar application. That said, there are definitely times when scheduling using Google Calendar, which I already use for group-related activities, would make more sense.

Using ScheduleOnce’s Google Calendar Firefox Add-on, that’s exactly what you can do. Just install the add-on via the ScheduleOnce web site, restart your browser, and then log into your Google Calendar to get started. From there, you can use the ScheduleOnce control panel in your sidebar to pick Tentative Availability times which are then optionally connected back to your Google Calendar. Once you’ve chosen your available times, ScheduleOnce generates a link that you can email to other potential attendees so that they can choose from the times you suggest.

Once invitees reply, you’ll be notified in the ScheduleOnce sidebar window. You’ll also receive a notification email from the web app with a direct link to allow you to view what times your invitee has chosen. When you click on it, you’ll be presented with a view of which times overlap, as indicated by a green block on ScheduleOnce’s daily agenda display. Connecting to your Google Calendar, selecting a time, and clicking “Schedule Meeting” will confirm the chosen slot and send a notification to all attendees. It’ll also add the event to your Google Calendar and those of your fellow attendees, so long as you all have the ScheduleOnce add-on installed.

It doesn’t sound complicated, and it isn’t in theory, but in practice I had to do a whole lot more reloading and reauthorizing than I should’ve probably been required to do. Whether this is a problem with the way ScheduleOnce is written, or with the Google Calendar developer API, I couldn’t say. All I know is that I found myself thinking somewhat wistfully back to the days of When is Good, when times were simpler. But if you absolutely abhor manually entering things into your Google Calendar, give ScheduleOnce a try. It is free, which definitely helps make up for its little quirks.

Do you use scheduling software, or, like me, do you prefer to do things manually?

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Google Tasks, the simple to-do system built into Gmail (previously covered on WebWorkerDaily), has just been integrated into Google Calendar. Tasks with due dates will now show up in the Calendar, and it’s possible to enter tasks directly into it as well.

Go into your Calendar, and you should see a “Tasks” link on the left-hand side of the window. Click it, and you’ll see a new Tasks sidebar spring up on the right, with all your tasks synced from Gmail, and a new “Tasks” calendar will be added to your list of calendars.

This means that tasks with a set due date will now show up in your Calendar in the “All Day” section at the top of the window (as tasks can only have a due date, not a a time).

You can enter tasks with a due date directly into your Calendar by clicking in the “All Day” boxes at the top of the window in “Day” or “Week” views (or on the day in “Month” view) and hitting  the “Task” link in the pop-up window.

After starting out as a simple and somewhat useful addition to Gmail, Tasks is becoming a very handy product in its own right, and while not as capable as full-featured to-do list apps like Things or Remember The Milk, it’s possible to use it in some quite powerful ways (for example, see my previous post on using Tasks as part of a GTD system).

Calendar integration was a no-brainer, as not being able to see Tasks due dates in your Calendar was quite annoying, but further integration with other Google products, like Docs, for example, could make the product even more useful.

Have you tried the new Tasks/Calendar integration? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

(via Google Operating System)

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FuseCal, a new web application, allows you to combine multiple calendars and create one master calendar. Ideally, this means you can take any iCal calendar such as Outlook 2003/2007, Google Calendar, Apple’s iCal, and Yahoo! Calendar and add them into FuseCal, granting you new functionality.

Specifically, once the individual calendars are imported into FuseCal, you can choose which events you’d like to add, filter events by keyword, and then add those into your master calendar. Once you have your master calendar built, you can easily import this new filtered and personalized calendar into Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, or whichever calendaring application you use.

Another feature of FuseCal is aimed at those who have their own websites and want to publish calendar data, such as a business who wants to publish upcoming events or a softball team who wishes to display their game schedule on their website.

To get started, sign into FuseCal and click on the “Publish Calendars” link. Follow the on-screen instructions for building your FuseCal calendar for publishing. The final step will provide you with an embeddable snipped of HTML to put on your website. If there are any changes to your embedded calendar, users subscribed to your calendar will automatically be notified in their calendaring application.

FuseCal is currently in “Alpha” and the service is free. Considering how new it is, I wouldn’t suggest keeping business critical data within FuseCal’s system. However, in my initial testing the services has worked as promised.

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In conclusion, time is wasted arranging meetings because they involve multiple email transactions and/or phone calls.

A newcomer to the meeting coordinating scene, Tungle is an add-on application that tries to take some of the frustration out of arranging meetings.

The Tungle Client

Tungle is a downloadable application that looks very much like an IM program. The application reads your calendar and shares your availability with your Tungle peers. One benefit of Tungle is that it doesn’t change or alter your Exchange calendar, just reads it for the purpose of allowing you to share your free/busy data. Tungle also allows you to see your contact’s free/busy data within Outlook, sans having to fire up the Tungle client.

At this point in time, Tungle only supports Microsoft Outlook (with or without an exchange server) on Windows Vista and XP.

Interoperability

If you want to schedule a meeting with someone who you know doesn’t have Outlook or Exchange, you can create a Tungle Space. A Tungle Space is simply a temporary web site to arrange a particular meeting. In the Spaces tab, you’ll see a grid representing the coming days. You click a zone that represents times that you’re free. An email is sent to those who you invite and they get a link to your Tungle space where they’re able to see your open times. The invitees select a block of time and the meeting is then booked.

When I asked Tungle CEO Marc Gringas about future plans to support other calendaring platforms such as Apple’s iCal and Google Calendar, he replied by stating these are the next two platforms are the next to be launched, with the same functionality as the Windows client.

Monetization

When asked about how they are going to monetize Tungle, Gringas said the basic client will always remain free. However they will eventually introduced premium services that will be billed monthly or yearly. Premium features will likely include detailed calendar information (rather than just free/busy data) and the ability to schedule meeting resources such as projectors, food, microphones, etc.

Conclusion

Tungle is an easy to use application that takes some of the trouble of scheduling meetings. However, until other calendaring applications are supported, I cannot see recommending this product for your scheduling needs. Those on Outlook 2007 already have the ability to share their free/busy data with those not on their Exchange system via the Internet Free/Busy functionality. There’s no reason to install and configure a third-party application when Outlook 2007 supports this out of the box.

Tungle’s true value will be realized when it serves as a cross-platform calendar scheduling system; bridging the gap between not only Outlook users across enterprises, but across operating systems and other calendaring platforms.

Tungle advertises that no data is kept on any central servers. Gringas, in our interview, told me Tungle works in a P2P fashion, similar to Skype. When I addressed the issue of privacy, I asked him if scheduling data is sent over the wire in clear-text. He responded by saying the beta build I was using did use clear-text but upon release, they’ll be employing encryption (off the top of his head, he thought it was Blowfish). I feel a bit uneasy about any type of clear-text communication of my data, so it I hope this encryption promise manifests.

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Printing your GCal

Chances are if you are a user of Google Calendar, at some point in time you’ve wanted to share your calendar with someone. Whether it be your husband/wife who wants to know what your week looks like, or a business colleague who you want to schedule a meeting with, easily sharing calendars can be a bit tricky. Sure you can always share your calendar with them via their Google Calendar or iCal, but what about the times you just want to easily give a snapshot of your day/week’s schedule?

Tech-Recipies.com shows us how to do this. First, click on the Print link at the top of your Google Calendar. Then, in the printing preferences, use the dropdowns to adjust the Font Size and Orientation. Check the Black and White checkbox. Now that you are done, click the “Save As…” button to easily download your newly created PDF calendar.

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