TimeBridge provides a Personal Scheduling Assistant service that makes scheduling a meeting as easy as sending a single email. Atlantic Research Group (ARG) was founded to provide small and mid-size biotech and pharmaceutical firms with high-quality clinical trial management services. ARG facilitates the often long and complex clinical-trial process and specializes in the fields of oncology, immunology, cardiology, ophthalmology, nephrology and metabolic disease.
Challenge
When ARG’s hosted email server solution crashed, the company wanted to revamp all email and calendaring applications and solve a chronic scheduling and availability-sharing problem that traditional applications could not. ARG wanted employees to be free to use whatever email application they wanted, yet be able to share their calendars and easily schedule meetings in a mixed Outlook and Google environment.
Solution
ARG chose Google Apps and TimeBridge, a Google Enterprise Partner, as a comprehensive email, calendar and scheduling solution. Google Apps addressed the need for a flexible email program that allowed users to work in whatever environment they want. While some employees used Google Calendar, others chose to stay in Outlook for their calendaring needs. To bridge the two applications, ARG turned to TimeBridge which integrates with both Outlook and Google calendars. Employees could easily share their calendars and cut down the time it takes to get people together by using TimeBridge’s one-step scheduling.
Results
ARG has been using the Google/TimeBridge solution since August 2007. Google Apps has allowed employees to work in whatever environment they choose and, when combined with TimeBridge, has enabled a more collaborative environment with easy calendar sharing. TimeBridge has eliminated the company’s scheduling woes by significantly cutting down on the time and effort spent getting people together for meetings. In addition, TimeBridge has further added value to the meeting process by offering useful tools such as web-conferencing, free conference calls and restaurant reservations.
“As the manager of IT at ARG, I don’t want to have to tell people where and how to work. Google Apps was great for letting people do what worked best for them and eliminating any kind of IT complexity and headache,” said Hunter Walker, VP of Clinical System at ARG. “While this led to a mixed application environment of Google and Outlook users, once we started using TimeBridge company-wide, everyone could share their calendars and schedule meetings in a fraction of the time it took previously.”
