Early yesterday morning I had a briefing with Jim Cook (CEO) and David Pearce (VP, Marketing) from Volutio Limited in the United Kingdom. Volutio develops services to help people collaborate; more specifically it has a new service–called Ikordo–in beta that focused on meeting scheduling. Kathleen Murray Tremblay from RedCliff Communications organized the call (thanks Kathleen).

Ikordo is based on the recognition that up to 60% of meetings are scheduled with people outside of one’s organization, and that today’s free/busy services hence don’t work. In its January 2007 research report (PDF) on meeting scheduling, Volutio found that 25% of executives spend up to three hours doing the mechanics of organizing a meeting with people outside of their organization; a further 6% spend a whole day doing so. Clearly there is a huge opportunity for improvement.

Ikordo, Volutio’s new service, is a Web-based and email-powered meeting and web conferencing scheduler. The organizer logs into their Ikordo account and follows a four-step wizard-driven process for setting up a meeting. They specify the title, the location, a date/time range that they’d like to meet during, the people that are invited (required and optional, and their time zones), and few other things. Everyone invited then gets an email message asking them for their availability in the selected date/time range, and when they reply to that email message, the Ikordo web service “reads” the email messages and parses it for acceptance information, alternative times, or a decline. Ikordo keeps track of everyone’s said availabiility, and when it has a core group that can attend at a certain time, it goes into persuasion and negotation mode with the people that have said they can’t attend. We all know that it is difficult to schedule meetings, but we also all know that we are often happy to shift existing commitments if someone asks nicely and we can see the benefit of doing so. So with Ikordo, if say 3 out of 4 people say they can attend at 10am on Tuesday, Ikordo will send a politely worded email message to the fourth asking them if there is any way that they can change their schedule to accomodate.

Once a common time is agreed, Ikordo sends out an email message with an iCal calendar attachment for dragging into the user’s calendar of choice.

There’s also an Outlook plug-in to enable the setting up of meetings via Ikordo using the Outlook meeting request form.

A couple of observations:

• The use of email messages for asking, confirming and negotiating on a meeting time has a number of advantages. Firstly, that’s how it is done by-and-large today, so people aren’t being asked to change their behavior. Secondly, with the proliferation of mobile devices that are email capable, this works everywhere.
• It’s currently “beta”, and I have to remind myself incessantly not to expect *all* the bells-and-whistles in a beta / v1 release. Things like being able to subscribe to your Ikordo calendar and have the meetings that are currently being set up shown as ghosted entries on your calendar–that would be nice, but it’s not essential for beta / v1. Ditto with some of the more advance time zone calculations and reconfigurations that I quizzed Jim and David on during the call.

Ikordo is about to enter a closed beta stage; you have to register to request a place, but if you miss out, the service is targeted for launch at the end of May 2007 in the UK, Ireland and North America.

Congratulations to Jim, David and the team on preparing a well-needed service. It will be very interesting to see how this goes.