A Brilliant Way to Organize a Meeting or Activity Online

It's time to celebrate a birthday, anniversary or new job with a group of close friends and family.  Or perhaps you need to get together with a few colleagues for a meeting.   What's the easiest way to arrange it?

If you're lucky enough to all work in the same organisation, and you all use something like Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes, the process is relatively easy.  You can search everyone's online diary to find dates and times when the entire group are free.

But what if you don't have such a tool at your disposal?  Do you have to resort to endless emails and phone calls, in a desperate attempt to find a date and time that suits everyone?  Thankfully, no.  The reason?  A brilliant web-based organiser called Doodle (www.doodle.com).

Using Doodle is simple.  Go to the site (there's no need to sign up or register).  Give your event (meeting, party, conference or whatever) a name and description, and pick a handful of dates and times that are suitable for you.  The site reckons that a choice of 5 different dates should be sufficient, and a selection of times within those dates.

Once you've done that, Doodle generates a unique URL for your event.  Just email it to everyone you want to invite.  They can then click to select which date/time combination they prefer.   You can log back into the site at any time, using a special "administration" URL which also gets generated when you create your event.  This allows you to view everyone's responses, add more dates/times, and so on.

Using Doodle is simple yet powerful.  You can, if you wish, integrate it with Google Calendar, Outlook, Yahoo and Facebook. 

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