App Awareness Month – Tungle

This post is part of App Awareness, our month-long series where we spotlight a different Google Apps Marketplace application every day in April. This week, we’re focusing on applications specifically geared to end-users and those that help streamline sales processes. The applications we chose to highlight demonstrate excellent integration with Google Apps, and we either use and love the product or know a lot of other people who do. Have a favorite Marketplace app of your own? Tweet it to @bettercloud.

Tungle – Scheduling Made Easy

If you’ve ever attempted to schedule a meeting with numerous attendants across multiple companies, you’ve likely run into several scheduling conflicts. Tungle was created to alleviate these conflicts and allow for simple and straightforward calendaring.

Tungle easily lets users view and schedule on others’ calendars, both within and outside of their organization. This not only helps participants avoid scheduling conflicts, but provides a seamless process to calendaring, reducing unnecessary back-and-forth between attendants and eliminating instances of double booking.

Tungle not only allows you to share calendars across companies, but also provides a bridge between different platforms. For example, if you’re on Google Calendar and a business partner is on Outlook, you can easily share your custom created calendar URL (ie www.tungle.me/FirstNameLastName) and side-step the divergent platforms altogether. While it’s easy to see the value of Tungle in this scenario, you may be asking why Tungle is necessary if both parties use the same platform, say Google Apps for instance. Unlike calendar sharing on Google Apps, where you must request and then grant sharing permission, Tungle provides sharing in one step via the custom calendar URL.

Google Apps Integration

When Tungle first came to market in 1999, the company looked at the existing players in online calendaring – Google, Apple and Microsoft. Rather than competing with these Internet heavyweights, Tungle chose to build a product that can easily integrate on top of other systems including: Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, Yahoo! and more plus major social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Using Tungle with Google Apps is extremely simple. After visiting the homepage, you can log in with your Google Apps account. After your account is created, you are brought to a screen displaying an empty calendar. In order to populate your calendar with Google Calendar meetings, select the calendar tab at the top of the page and choose ‘Sync calendar/contacts.’ After approving the integration, information from your Google Calendar will be pulled in to populate Tungle. You can sync as many different Gmail accounts as you’d like as well as any of the above mentioned networks.

Google Apps Domain Administrators can install and deploy the Tungle application via the Google Apps Marketplace for free, or individual users can sign up for accounts via the website (also at no cost).

Why We Like It

Whether we’re scheduling time with a reseller, client, or other Google Apps Marketplace developer, Tungle lets us schedule meetings faster with people outside our company. You just need to send the invitee a link to your public calendar via the custom URL, or include the URL in your email signature as you would with your email or phone number. And if you’re concerned you might be sharing sensitive information, fear not. Tungle lists free time as ‘Available’ and displays prior engagements as blanks on your calendar, effectively avoiding double bookings and keeping private information private.

One of the reasons we love Google Apps so much is because of the platform’s go anywhere capability. And we believe this capability should extend to all great end-user-facing third-party apps. Tungle’s site is fully optimized for mobile, meaning you can open that calendar invite right from your phone’s Gmail inbox and on to the Tungle platform, allowing you to schedule meetings with anyone, anywhere at anytime.

Stay tuned for more of our favorite Apps in the Google Apps Marketplace!

Can you guess tomorrow’s app?
Hint: This app can manage all of your customer relationships!

About App Awareness Month

At BetterCloud, we’ve seen first hand the impact Google Apps can have on a business: extreme cost cutting, streamlined management processes, enhanced collaboration and mobility and much more.

During our time as an independent software provider focused 100% on the Google Apps platform, we’ve interacted with thousands of organizations using Google Apps and we’ve discovered one common trend: knowledge and awareness of third-party applications that extend and enhance Google Apps is extremely limited.

This April, we’re devoting the BetterCloud blog to educating Google Apps users on the wide array of applications available for Google Apps today. These Google Apps extensions not only enhance native Google Apps functionalities, but bring a diverse range of services from CRM, to expense management, process and systems management and more to your Google Apps environment. More importantly, adding these applications to Google Apps allows you to retire expensive legacy software licenses and creates a more cohesive organization.