PC World — If you're like me, you probably hate attending business meetings. But a number of useful Internet-based tools have arisen that can help workgroups schedule and run them more effectively. All of the tools here work within most popular Web browsers, and most of them are available for free or for fairly low monthly fees. The challenge is in understanding which tool suits a particular situation, because not every meeting is held under the same circumstances.

Sync Multiple Calendars

Certainly the most common situations are those where you want to synchronize a common calendar, such as between someone's PDA and their Microsoft Outlook desktop, or between a boss's calendar and an assistant's. Many services can make sharing calendars between work team members (or even between family members or friends) easier. Both Google Calendar and Yahoo Calendar offer free calendar sync, and numerous other products--including Calgoo's Connect, Apple's MobileMe and iTunes for its computers and iPhones, NuevaSync, and SugarSync--work with both services. BusySync and Spanning Sync also can synchronize Apple's iCal calendars with Google Calendar.

But these sync services don't always work correctly. Part of the problem is that most online calendar and scheduling products make use of e-mail for notification of events and invitations, and it is difficult for various calendar programs to recognize or act on such e-mail messages in any consistent fashion. Another issue is that if you get an e-mail from the calendar program with an embedded URL, your corporate antispam service might block it. And in still another situation, two people on two different Microsoft Exchange servers might wish to schedule a common meeting--it is possible to hook up both Exchange calendars so that they synchronize with the same Google Calendar account, but it can be tricky. One potential solution for that last problem is to use Cemaphore's MailShadow for Google Apps to synchronize the Exchange servers with Google Calendar; the software costs $60 per e-mail account per year.

One thing that both Google Calendar and Yahoo Calendar are great at doing is sending out e-mail reminders about recurring meetings to a collection of addresses. As long as you have entered the right addresses, this function works well.

Let Clients Set Up Appointments

What if you want your clients or any other people not employed by your company to book your time directly? In the long-ago past, appointment secretaries would be in charge of the boss's calendar and would set up meeting times with pencil and paper. Now you can point clients and outside colleagues to self-service appointment scheduler Web sites, such as HourTown or TimeDriver. These sites can display your staffers' free and busy times, as well as what remaining time "inventory" is available for appointments. They also send out e-mail notifications, and they don't require any special software beyond a Web browser to confirm the appointment. You can easily adjust the schedule when you are going out of town or are otherwise unavailable, too. Both services are available for a reasonable cost: TimeDriver has a free 90-day trial and is $30 a year thereafter; HourTown offers three different plans, including a free one that allows two monthly bookings.

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