Mountain View, California — Nothing ruins an admin’s day swiftly than suddenly needing to reschedule the boss’ afternoon meetings. In an attempt to resolve the scheduling conflicts that unavoidably arise when busy people try to get together, Google on Thursday introduce a new Google Calendar Labs experiment called “Smart Rescheduler” that brings some search smarts to the problem.
Scheduling becomes effortless when treated as a search problem. Google is now publicly testing a new feature for its Calendar application that would solve a very difficult part of personal time management with its latest experimental rescheduling program that auto-suggests a new time and date for a meeting that needs to be rescheduled, now available for both the free and paid versions of its online Calendar service.
(Credit: Google)
“Shortly, all the Google apps customers will get this,” says Google Calendar product manager Cyrus Mistry. “It is like we are giving every employee their own administrative assistant.”
Similar to the way Google’s search engine employs algorithms to detect and rank relevant results to a query, the Smart Rescheduler determines a variety of variables, like invitees’ time zones, appointments, meetings and conflicts, to suggest alternative times for a meeting.
Smart rescheduling, as Google names it, allows the person arranging the meeting enters the names of the participants, how long the meeting will be, date and time by when the meeting must take place. The Smart Rescheduler then sours and checks out every participants schedules to see when everyone is free, taking into account different time zones and other commitments on their calendars (in order for this to work, all the meeting attendees must share their calendars with Google Calendar).
The characteristic, which numerous start-ups have attempted to solve over the years, automates the process of finding these new times. “It is an early-stage experiment that approaches calendaring from a search perspective,” said Ken Norton, a Google Calendar product manager.
“By analyzing everyone’s calendars, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby,” explains Google engineer David Marmaros in a blog post. “You can refine the results by marking people as optional, changing the meeting duration, ignoring certain conflicts, or specifying the earliest and latest times you will accept. The results will immediately update to reflect your new requirements.”
The newly released lab application is primarily targeted at administrative subordinates who are in charge of scheduling meetings with many attendees, to help them more quickly reschedule meetings.
Scheduling, explains Mistry, is a ranking problem that is similar to search. “We know how to work out difficult ranking problems,” he said.
Mistry demonstrates the difficulty of arranging a meeting with 20 executives, all directors, five of whom are in Zurich, Switzerland, and five of whom are in Hyderabad, India. With Smart Rescheduler, you can click on a link and generate a list of the best possible times, he says.
Google Calendar casts aside all of these factors together and comes up with a ranking for the best possible meeting time. “We did look at algorithms for search to see how they solved which doc should come to the top,” says Mistry. “We discover what meeting should come out on top.” The Rescheduler can even book new conference rooms based on which one is closest to the original one and the same size.
Smart Rescheduler is available with the click of a radio button located in the Labs tab under the Settings menu in Google Calendar.
Mistry observes that this instant availability, without any software to install, is one of the benefits of cloud computing.
“In a sense what we have done is given everyone a personal assistant,” he said.