Leadership By Numbers

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Tungle has just released their latest beta for supporting the Lotus Notes 8.0.2/8.5 client. It's only at release 0.80, but it is good enough that Tungle has my vote. At my company, there has been an increasing need to provide calendar integration. Some corners of the enterprise rely on Microsoft Exchange and we have a business need to be able to coordinate our meeting schedules, independent of the messaging platform.

In addition, the connectivity of the Internet has altered work relationships so that many people want a more nuanced technology for calendar integration with the people they know. iPhones, Blackberries, and the Android are stretching work boundaries outside of corporate walls. LinkedIn, Facebook, GMail, Twitter, Xing and Ning are growing new communities, many of which are work related. So, how can I schedule my time with my associates ? How can I look up shared meeting spaces to verify an open slot ?

For about eight months, I've been looking at different solutions which I can divide into three classes.

1. Consolidate everybody onto a single platform. The difficulty with this choice, is that depending on the size of "everybody" it's a very expensive option. There has been a trend to solve this dilemma by pushing disparate messaging platforms onto a hosted service, which can be less expensive than an on-premise solution. But, any messaging transition is disruptive and costly, whether it is hosted or not.

2. Another possibility is to integrate the calendaring between these various messaging systems. The most notable provider for enterprise calendar integration is BinaryTree's Calendar Connector. It integrates calendar lookups for different entreprise domains (Exchange to Exchange), and platforms (e.g., Domino to Exchange).

It's an on-premise solution.
It would provide full lookups, in our existing infrastructure with no end user involvement.
It works with the desktop clients, as well as for browser-based email.
Unfortunately, an estimated cost for our architecture is in the range of $100,000.00

 3. The last category is where shared calendaring is supported as Software as a Service. This industry is still nascent, and IBM and others will be certainly be creating similar offerings. Interestingly, most of these SaaS companies provide a basic set of functionality at zero-cost. This is important for us, because the only way to ensure that calendar sharing will work for us as SaaS, is if everyone uses the same service. It's like using public IM systems, if Group A is on AIM then they can't chat with Group B on Google Talk. As long as the initial set of functionality is free, then it's much easier to get everyone to agree to the same service.

The last time that I checked there were four primary services for calendar sharing:

1. Timebridge ( http://www.timebridge.com/ ) is only for Outlook and iCal.
2. Jiffle ( http://www.jifflenow.com ) is only for Outlook and iCal.
3. Doodle ( http://www.doodle.com ) has connectors for Outlook, Lotus Notes, iCal, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail.
4. Tungle ( http://www.tungle.com ) has connectors for Outlook, Entourage, Lotus Notes, Blackberries, iPhone, iCal, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail.

For Lotus Notes, Tungle has programmed a widget plug-in. The idea being that it's the Notes client which collects the calendaring information from the user's account and pushes it into Tungle's cloud. They are advertising themselves as using a "freemium" business model, where premium services will eventually be added at an extra cost.

I've selected Tungle, because they have the broadest offerings ( http://tungle.me/Home/Faq.htm) , and because they support both Windows and Macintosh users for Lotus Notes. Tungle integrates with the Eclipse client for Lotus Notes, which we have already installed on all new Macintosh systems and we are in the process of pushing to all users (mostly Windows). The shared calendaring is even tunable so that it is only available to a specific list of accounts for each email user. Just to be on the safe side, I ran netstat and confirmed that the connection between the Notes client and the hosted service is encrypted.

Sometime, I'd like to give a full review. I've been in the beta program for over four months, and Tungle's responsiveness is encouraging. In the meanwhile, I hope that I outlined the most salient aspects of Tungle and why it's getting my recommendation.

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