SEGURO OPCIONAL DE VIAJE.
CONTRATO DE VIAJE COMBINADO / RUTA DEL OKAVANGO
This chapter provides an overview of current practices for finding suitable meeting times and scheduling meetings, as it is important to understand the current ways of working when designing a new service. The focus of the analysis is on practices and tools currently used to schedule work meetings. However, the same practices and tools might be used as well for scheduling private meetings. First, a general overview of the process is given. Then, four different practices for scheduling meetings are described: e-mail, sharing calendar, polls and publishing availability.
Meeting times can either be scheduled (with verification), i.e., the meeting organizer aims at finding a time slot that is suitable for all participants, or announced, i.e., the meeting organizer announces a meeting time without taking the availability of the invitees into consideration. Most meetings are scheduled (with verification) rather than just announced (Ehrlich 1987a). Reasons for just announcing a meeting time are a large number of invitees, announcing the meeting well in advance, or that invitees are expected to prioritize that meeting in case of scheduling conflicts (Ehrlich 1987a). As meeting organizers typically do not consider the schedule of the invitees when just announcing a time for meeting, the focus in this study is on meetings, for which the meeting organizer and invitees agree on a suitable time slot.
In order to find suitable time slots different approaches are used: either using traditional ways of communication, such as face-to-face discussion, phone calls, chat or e-mail, or using specific tools, which support meeting scheduling. Regarding using traditional ways of communication, this study only explains scheduling meetings via e-mail in more detail as it is common practice in companies today and other ways of communication follow a similar pattern. Tools supporting finding suitable time slots are calendar sharing applications, polls, or tools to publish one’s availability.
E-‐mail
Agreeing on a time for a meeting via e-mail is common practice. Finding a time slot that is suitable for all participants can be achieved through two different strategies: negotiation and aggregation (Hu & Brzozowski 2005). When applying a negotiation strategy, meeting organizers send an e-mail suggesting time slots and the recipients reply which of those are suitable for them or suggest additional time slots. When applying an aggregation strategy, meeting organizers send out an e-mail asking for everybody’s availabilities and aggregate the responses manually in order to derive common free time slots. Once a suitable time slot is found, organizers send a meeting request either via e-mail or from their own calendar system. Table 4 summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of finding suitable meeting time slots via e-mail.
Table 4: Advantages and disadvantages of finding suitable meeting time slots via e-‐mail
Advantages Disadvantages
• Low privacy concerns as calendar is not shared
• Allows invitees to set their availability specifically for a certain event (i.e., prioritize in case of scheduling conflicts)
• No special tool or service required
• Requires manual effort from the invitees to check and confirm suitable time slots
• Can take a long time for all participants to respond while availabilities might change
• Not always unambiguous respond of availability due to free form (individual might suggests additional option or not comment on all the provided options) • Long e-mail chains can make it
difficult to get a clear overview
Sharing calendar
Sharing electronic calendars is common practice in most companies today in order to enable easier meeting scheduling between colleagues. Various applications, such as Microsoft Exchange4 and Google Calendar5, exist that support calendar sharing.
While in some companies colleagues share only their free and busy times, which is also referred to as restricted access model, in other companies colleagues share more calendar details, such as topic and location, which is referred to as open access model (Grudin 1996). A major difference between the two approaches is that the open
4 Microsoft Corporation, [Online] http://office.microsoft.com/en-‐001/exchange/ [Accessed 4.9.2013]. 5 Google Inc., [Online] https://www.google.com/calendar [Accessed 4.9.2013].
access model allows inferences about availability on a more granular level than the binary ‘free’ or ‘busy’ information (cf. section 2.4.2).
In order to schedule a meeting, meeting organizers add invitees to a meeting request and see their available time slots. Some applications support finding suitable time slots by providing suggestions. The meeting request is send directly from the calendar application and added automatically to the organizer’s and invitees calendar. However, these tools do not support sharing calendar with people who work in different organizations or use a different calendar application. The advantages and disadvantages of sharing calendars for scheduling meeting are summarized in Table 5. Even though not the focus of this study, it should be noted that some people also share their calendar with their significant other or close friends (Thayer et al. 2012; 2013). Furthermore, families typically have a family calendar to keep track of the appointments of all family members; however, this is usually not in digital format (Neustaedter & Greenberg 2008).
Table 5: Advantages and disadvantages of finding suitable meeting time slots via shared calendars
Advantages Disadvantages
• Open access model enables organizers to make inferences about actual availability of others
• Little manual effort
• Everybody can follow up on response status
• High privacy concerns (especially open access model)
• Amount of calendar appointments as well as their content can lead to judgment
• Calendar can only be shared within the same domain and if same application is used
• Externals can be added to the meeting request with their email address (but their availability is not shared)
Polls
The third category refers to services, such as Doodle and Meetin.gs6, which enable
meeting organizers to create a poll online with different suggestions for meeting dates and times. A link to the poll is sent to the invitees via e-mail by the meeting organizer or directly through the service. Invitees mark the times that are suitable for them (Figure 11). In Doodle, it is possible to give the invitees, in addition to ‘yes’ and ‘no’, the third option ‘if-need-be’, in order for them to indicate times that are not their
preference, but would be possible. Furthermore, it is possible to create hidden polls in Doodle, so that only the organizer can see the responses from the invitees. While a hidden poll poses less privacy concern (Kellermann & Böhme 2009), it reduces the likelihood of finding common suitable time slots (Reinecke et al. 2013). Thus, an open poll might be more beneficial in most cases, but if privacy issues are a strong concern, a hidden poll might be the better option. In addition, Doodle enables the organizer to set a closing date for the poll in order to encourage prompt responses. Once all invitees have responded to a poll, meeting organizers send an email to the invitees with the chosen time slot or send a meeting request from their own calendar system. The advantages and disadvantages of finding suitable time slots through an online poll are summarized in Table 6.
Figure 11: Screenshot of a Doodle poll. Participants can mark their available times as well as check the responses of other participants.
Table 6: Advantages and disadvantages of finding suitable meeting time slots through a poll
Advantages Disadvantages
• Low privacy concerns as calendar is not shared
• Allows invitees to set their availability specifically for a certain event (i.e., prioritize in case of scheduling conflicts)
• Organizer can set deadline for closing poll to support quicker responses (Doodle)
• Indifferent whether invitees are users of the service
• Requires manual effort from the invitees to check and mark suitable time slots
• Can take a long time for all participants to respond while availabilities might change
Publish availability
The last category refers to services, such as Doodle7 and Meeting.gs, which enable
users to publish their availability (free and busy times) online on a so-called ‘Meet Me’-page. Users can connect their calendar (in Meetin.gs only Google Calendar and in Doodle various calendars including Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, Apple iCal) and times show as available on the ‘Meet Me’-page when there is no booking in the calendar. In Meetin.gs, users can further limit their availability to certain days of the week and times of day. In Meetin.gs PRO version, users can have several ‘Meet Me’ pages and can set their availability for each of them differently (Meetin.gs 2013). For both, Doodle and Meetin.gs the user chooses the end of the URL (e.g.,
www.doodle.com/ownurl). The ‘Meet Me’-page is publicly available, so that everyone who has the URL can see the availability, even without logging in to the service. If the user chooses an easy end for the URL, such as ‘firstnamelastname’, it might even be possible to find someone’s ‘Meet Me’-page through trial-and-error, even without being provided with the link.
Both services provide good meeting scheduling support for 1:1 meetings as users who are signed in to the service can schedule a meeting from another persons ‘Meet Me’-page. If Doodle users have connected their Google calendar to the service, they can see their own calendar details and the invitees free and busy time slots (Figure 12). However, neither Doodle nor Meetin.gs support similar functionality if more people need to be invited to a meeting. Even if all invitees have a ‘Meet Me’-page, the organizer would need to check all of them manually and aggregate the common free time slots manually. Moreover, to send the actual meeting request, organizers either
7 Doodle AG, [Online] http://www.doodle.com/about/meetMe.html [Accessed 5.9.2013]
need to send one for each invitee from the respective ‘Meet Me’-pages or use another tool, such as e-mail or their own calendar application, to send the meeting request. The advantages and disadvantages of publishing one’s availability to enable easier meeting scheduling are summarized in Table 7.
Figure 12: Screenshot of scheduling meeting from Doodle ‘Meet Me’ page. The user can see
Despite the advantages of being able to set up several ‘Meet Me’-pages in Meetin.gs PRO, it might lead to challenges in practice if the user does plan carefully, how to group people. Meetin.gs describes the example that a user has one page for all his customers and another one for the more important ones (Meetin.gs 2013). However, if one customer first gets the link to the general one and later on the user considers him as more important customer and provides him with the link to the ‘Meet Me’- page for those customers, the user cannot ensure that this customer will use that and it might be confusing for the customer it get another link.
Table 7: Advantages and disadvantages of finding suitable meeting time slots through publishing availability
Advantages Disadvantages
• For 1:1 meetings little manual effort required
• Easy sharing of availability (only need to provide a link)
• Allows users to limit availability to certain days of week and times of day (Meetin.gs)
• High privacy concerns as availability is publicly shared
• Checking of availability possible only for one person at a time
As concluded in previous research for MSS, existing solution are not convenient for scheduling meetings across heterogeneous calendar systems (Korjus 2012). However, a comparison of the existing meeting scheduling practices and tools also highlights two major challenges for the design of a meeting scheduling service. First, while sharing calendar details makes it easier to find suitable times slots, it raises privacy concerns. Thus, different services accommodate for a variety of privacy needs, from hidden Doodle polls to public sharing of availability on ‘Meet Me’-pages. Second, while automation of finding suitable time slots decreases the amount of manual effort, it might decrease the likelihood of finding a common suitable timeslot as it removes the possibility of the judgment of the invitees about the importance of a specific meeting and adjusting their availability accordingly.