Scheduling App TimeDriver Rebranded as TimeTrade Professional

Aliza Sherman — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:00:58 +0000

Faced with the multitude of scheduling apps that are now available — including Tungle.me, ScheduleOnce, TimeBridge, Doodle, among many others — TimeTrade has been updating its product range in order to stay competitive. Recently the company announced several major changes to its TimeDriver product, including a name change.

TimeDriver was the company’s solution for individuals (as opposed to enterprise users) who wanted to allow others to see their schedules and book appointments, without revealing their entire calendar. The application also let users create different appointment “books” or specific invitations for different purposes. For example, I set up one appointment book for meetings when I was attending a conference, one for demos of products for review on this blog and yet another for recorded interviews for some of my podcasts. Each “book” could contain the same or different blocks of availability and could be sent to different people with a relevant greeting and invitation text.

The company has now announced that the TimeDriver brand would be discontinued, and the product would be moved under the broader TimeTrade brand. The three scheduling services now offered by TimeTrade now are:

TimeTrade Professional. This service is the renamed TimeDriver product for individuals. It costs $29.95 per year, with a free 30-day trial.
TimeTrade Workgroup Edition. This is a new application providing appointment scheduling for teams. The Workgroup version allows for corporate branding, reporting, and a way to centrally administer the application. The application also integrates with popular CRM systems like Salesforce.com as well as with team members’ Outlook or Google calendars. It costs $249 per user/per year with a free 30-day trial.
TimeTrade Enterprise. This is a self-service scheduling application for major corporations that includes custom web applications, lead routing, multi-location support and a widget-based tool kit and API for integration and customization. Price is available on application.

If you would like to be able to easily send out invitations to different groups of people for self-serve appointment-making, TimeTrade Professional is a good solution. Personally, I’d use TimeTrade for custom appointment-making but will continue to use Tungle.me for my individual scheduling needs, coupled with occasional use of Doodle when I’m coordinating multiple people’s schedules (and especially when participants are less tech-oriented). Regardless of what tools you end up using, keep in mind time zone issues, particularly if you are traveling between time zones and scheduling; see this post about my time zone snafu and scheduling bungle.

What tool or tools do you use to sync calendars and schedule appointments?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

TimeDriver Pares Down Enterprise Scheduling For You

Aliza Sherman — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:00:14 +0000

You need to schedule back-to-back demos with different tech companies. Or you want to hold “virtual office hours” for lead generation and effortlessly book them based on your actual availabilities each week. You don’t have a personal assistant. So what do you do?

Take TimeDriver for a test run. Judi Sohn covered this app after DEMO earlier this year. TimeDriver is a free, stripped-down version of TimeTrade System’s TimeTrade Enterprise Scheduling Application (TESA), the solution behind big companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield, QuestDiagnostics and Charles Schwab. Stripped down, however, doesn’t mean feature poor.Opening up for a public beta on August 25, TimeDriver takes the guesswork and busywork out of scheduling individual appointments with a number of different people.So how does it do what it does?

First, TimeDriver connects with either your Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar. For those of you using iCal (like me), you can sync your iCal with Google Calendar using SpanningSync to take advantage of this personal appointment scheduling system. The company says they still plan on supporting Salesforce and Lotus Notes in the near future but they are adding the most popular calendaring programs first.

Next, you use TimeDriver’s calendaring page to indicate blocks of time when you’d like to schedule appointments by dragging from the start to the end time. The system syncs up with your overall calendar and immediately blacks out times where you already have something else scheduled and will continue to do so as you add any additional events or appointments to your personal calendar.

Then you can generate a link that you can share with others to schedule their appointments with you. So if you are working on scheduling back-to-back demos with tech companies, the system will email individual messages to each company rep with an embedded button that brings each person to their own private page with your invitation.

From there, they can click over to view open dates and times for scheduling a demo with you, add any notes, and submit the information into the system. The date and time they choose is automatically removed from the availablitilites that others will see.

If you are soliciting leads on your web site or even your LinkedIn page and are offering to speak with people for a free assessment of their needs with the hopes of landing some new clients, you can embed the scheduling link on your Web site. When people click on it, they are led to the TimeDriver system to schedule a phoner with you.

In a nutshell, the process for setting up TimeDriver is:

1. Name your event.

2. Choose whether it will be by phone or a face-to-face meeting.

3. Pick a duration for the event.

4. Compose your invitation message (photo or logo optional). You can even add a qualifying question to get information in advance.

5. Pick your windows of availability.

6. Get scheduling link or send out emails for the activity you’ve set up.

What TimeDriver does not do is coordinate scheduling for multiple people. The company feels there are enough players in that area.

The TimeDriver system does track all recipients of the emails you send including who has responded, who has looked at your invitation but hasn’t responded and who hasn’t looked at all. You can trigger a followup message to those who haven’t yet confirmed a date and time. The system also accounts for each person’s time zone based on their machine settings.

Currently in Alpha is an integrated Outlook add-on that inserts a scheduling link into emails composed through the program.

Personally, I can see using TimeDriver for:

1. Letting people schedule 1/2 hour free consultations with me via my LinkedIn page and web site to cultivate new clients.

2. Scheduling check-in calls with clients in clusters so I can be more efficient about direct contact with them to supplement the more-typical daily emails.

3. Booking more Web app demos with tech companies in neat blocks of time so I can be incredibly productive.

You can pre-register for TimeDriver’s open beta at their site. Doors open on August 25th. The basic TimeDriver service is free.

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Scheduling App TimeDriver Rebranded as TimeTrade Professional

TimeDriver Pares Down Enterprise Scheduling For You