Following on from my conversation with Rajesh Setty on iPolipo a couple of days back, today I met with Hari Shetty, iPolipo’s CEO for a demo. Here’s some of the additional points that Hari and I discussed:

• When you send a meeting invite to another person, you choose on-the-fly which group they’re in. You don’t assign them to one group for ever and a day.



• Each iPolipo user gets to define their own group names … for things that are relevant / interesting / appropriate to them.
• Once a meeting invitee has accepted a meeting time, whenever they visit the other person’s iPolipo calendar in the future, they’ll see the meeting times that they currently have scheduled. That’s cool.
• When an iPolipo user goes to set up a meeting with another iPolipo user, they must manually correlate their own calendar with the available time published by the other iPolipo user. In other words, there is no overlaying of their calendar with the free/available time of others. Maybe this is a future direction for iPolipo.
• When a band of time is flagged as being available for meetings with certain groups, a “busy” appointment is ghosted in the user’s calendar. This means that the person can see what they’ve made available to others, but it also means that (a) that time is marked as busy (whereas it is really only “an-offer-of-busy”), and (b) if you have wireless sync to your BlackBerry, you will get meeting confirmations. Outlook may not provide a sufficient depth of capability to tease out this nuance inherent in iPolipo, but my view is that they’ll have to do something different in this area than what happens today.
• iPolipo is a for-fee service … the basic service is $99 per year, and there’s a premium service for $149 a year. The main two differences revolve around the amount of availability information that is displayed to casual visitors and how much is stored on the servers. The basic service is 3 weeks for a “limited invite” and 3 months of availability data; the premium service is twice that.
• There is a new update of iPolipo planned for the end of this month, and it will offer three main new features: an easier way of sending out calendar sharing invites, integration with the Outlook Contacts database (for easier addressing of meeting invites), and a plug-in for web sites / blogs for publishing calendar availability information to a wider audience.

iPolipo has some early adopter clients that rave about the service. Here’s what Bill Sherman, VP and Partner at Intulogy says:

“We’re a virtual company without a central office, and iPolipo makes our meetings happen. When my internal people want to meet with me, they can access my calendar directly. I’ve also extended iPolipo privileges to my clients, who now find it far easier to reach out to me and connect. Overall, my life has become easier. I save 60-90 minutes each week, because iPolipo streamlines the whole meeting planning process.”

If you’re an Outlook user, I encourage you to check it out.