Google partners with calendaring tool for its online apps

In a move to draw small business users away from services such as Microsoft Outlook and Exchange, Google today announced the TimeBridge collaborative calendar tool will be made compatible with Google Enterprise Professional.

Google Enterprise Professional program is a service designed to let business employees collaborate on projects together regardless of where they are. The TimeBridge partnership will also carry over to Google Apps, its online applications suite.

The value proposition for Google Apps continues to be that users can make use of their tools from any desktop, without software having to be installed on one centralized system.

Collaborative calendars are a principal feature of connectivity systems such as Microsoft Exchange (which relies heavily on Outlook) and Lotus Domino (which relies on Notes). But for smaller operations that don't need sophisticated planning tools, TimeBridge could be a reasonable alternative.

Specifically, the TimeBridge Personal Scheduling Manager can be used by Google Apps users to let users view and schedule different meetings through a centralized database. Furthermore, users actually have a choice of client-based applications, as TimeBridge already has a toolbar and plug-in for Outlook.

During a quick trial run of TimeBridge's service by BetaNews, we were able to schedule a meeting simply by entering an e-mail address of someone to invite to a meeting, the meeting name and discussion goals, and an ideal meeting time. Once the account was synced with our Google Calendar account, all previous appointments in that account were shown through TimeBridge.