For those of us who rely on Outlook to manage our activities, trying to schedule a meeting with those who do not use the Outlook Calendar can be a pain. For me, that pain usually comes when I work with a faculty group, because many of our faculty do not have their schedules on Outlook.

That is why finding a tool called “Doodle” was like finding a painkiller for meeting schedulers like me.

Doodle is an online meeting-scheduling and polling tool. Not only does its name rhyme with “Google,” the simple and clear interface of its site design also resembles that of Google. Once you are on the site, you have two simple choices: to schedule an event or to make a choice. To schedule a meeting is as simple as entering the meeting name, selecting the dates, and adding the time slots, and to make a choice is to generate a simple poll for participants.

One possible drawback is that the system doesn’t authenticate the user. This means you may not want to use it for any formal class survey, where there might be some naughty ones trying to trick the system. But as long as you’re dealing with a collaborative group, Doodle can certainly offer you the quickest and easiest result.

I learned about Doodle from a friend of mine who is a university administrator a few months after the company was founded, in March 2008. Over the past few months, I noticed it becoming popular among DePaul faculty for committee-meeting scheduling. Doodle’s growth rate of more than two million users per month makes me hesitant to blog about it, because everyone may have known about it already! If so, take this as my example of a short and simple blog entry.