by I just got email from the office of the associate dean for research in the college of engineering where I work. They want people to go fill out a doodle poll so they can figure out when to schedule a meeting.
When we don’t provide a necessary service the users will find a workaround. Most of the time that workaround is suboptimal — and it points a very accusing finger at the people who failed to deliver a working product to the users.
This is something that shouldn’t require people to go answer a survey. The group calendar (remember those?) should look at the schedules of all invited attendees and find a time they can meet, yet a “prestigious university” is using an outside poll (as in, go tell it when you’re available) to try to schedule meetings.
This should be a solved problem. In fact, it was – I was using a product called Meeting Maker in 1993. It knew your calendar and did the work of finding a time. It wasn’t a great product and it was kind of slow but it did the job.
We have groups that work and schedule meetings exclusively with each other doing the same thing so this isn’t a domain or scoping problem. Where’s the API that lets calendars from different vendors and servers find common times/locations? Where’s the push to install a working solution?
Where’s the solution we should be providing, instead of making our users go outside to find something a really inferior method of doing things?