While many planners find themselves squeezed for time these days, the good news is that there is a growing choice of technology tools that bring efficiency and cost savings to the meeting planning process.

Although there is no one perfect answer for every planner’s needs, a wide variety of software applications have been developed over the years to automate the extensive—and sometimes tedious—details involved in meeting planning.

Following are some examples of a few technologies available now.


Standard Practices

Among the important new meetings tech tools available is Toolbox 2.0, which was released last fall by the Convention Industry Council (www.conventionindustry.org), an umbrella group consisting of representatives from 32 meetings and exhibition industry associations. The organization has been working toward a set of Accepted Practices Exchange (APEX) standards designed to enable planners and venues to communicate in the same language.

Toward this end, Toolbox 2.0 includes more than 200 event management and business templates, covering such industry aspects as RFPs, rooming lists, show contractors, destination management companies, audiovisual providers, transportation requirements, registration, event specifications, meeting and site profiles, function schedules, post-event reports, contracts, best practices, and more.

The templates cost $99 (a free trial version is available, and an upgrade is free for those who purchased the 1.0 version). While the templates don’t yet connect planner and venue electronically (some commercial applications that do are listed below), they do work with Word, Excel and PowerPoint.


Address Book Extreme

Managing and organizing contact information is made simple through a software program called Plaxo (www.plaxo.com).

John McCrea, vice president of marketing for Plaxo, says this free system, with over 15 million people registered, is a “smart address book you can use for your entire life. It’s self-updating, so whenever someone in your address book changes jobs, moves, gets a new cell phone number, your contact information is automatically up-to-date.”

With that many registrants (and growing daily), McCrea says “that’s probably a pretty good percentage of the people in your address book.” The system can be used with Outlook, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, Mac OS X, and Mozilla Thunderbird.

Remember the times you’ve tried to reach a sales person only to learn that person is now with a different hotel or has moved to another city? Think about all the phone calls you’ve made to a wrong number, or when you’ve sent mail to a wrong address. You’ve wasted time and money and you’ll waste more by trying to update the information. Throw in a little frustration factor and you should already see a benefit to becoming a part of the Plaxo community.

Among Plaxo’s many features are the ability to merge and remove duplicate contacts, to recover data, to search contacts, and to view a calendar from a mobile phone. There is also 24/7 phone and e-mail support, one-on-one remote live assistance and the capacity to store more than 1,000 contacts. The cost is $49.95 a year.

You provide as much or as little business and personal information as you wish when signing on with Plaxo, including primary and additional e-mail addresses, phone numbers and even your birthday. Whenever you meet someone new, you determine whether he or she is in the Plaxo system and key in the name. The person’s contact information will already be entered in the system.

Plaxo information is hosted on secure Web services, and lets you access it via a regular Web browser from wherever you are—at home, at the office or on a mobile phone (it doesn’t even have to be a “smart phone”). The system is available in 80 countries in English, with foreign language capabilities scheduled to be added by the end of the year.


On Schedule

TimeBridge (www.timebridge.com) is a new free service that makes planning small meetings almost a breeze. Started in May 2005 and launched in private beta in November 2006, it incorporates your Outlook calendar, noting when you have something scheduled and when you have free time. It includes the calendars of your company’s personnel, so you can see when they’re available.

Yori Nelken, CEO and company founder of TimeBridge, says 80 percent of its target offices are using Outlook for their scheduling or contact maintenance.

“There are about 380 million users of Outlook, and that’s why we started there,” Nelken says. “We want to include virtually everybody who has a scheduling problem.”

John Stormer, vice president of marketing, adds that the service also works when communicating with people outside of your company.

“You simply send an e-mail to the people you want at the meeting with a suggestion of two or three times when you’re available and they respond with their availability,” he says. “While the meeting time and place are pending, the possible times are put in a tentative slot and once the meeting is scheduled, the tentative time slots are eliminated. No more writing in your desk calendar and then going back to delete the alternative times and dates. You receive a report that notes when the most people are available for which times, then you set the meeting and select the most ideal time block. Then an e-mail is sent confirming that information.”

Nelken says that TimeBridge is designed to coordinate meetings for up to about 25 people.

“You wouldn’t want to use it for more people,” Nelken says, “because at that point you’d say, ‘This is when we’re meeting. Who’s going to be there?’”

Additional third-party services will eventually be available, including maps, weather, reservations, conferencing, and online meetings.