Smart Rescheduler can rank possible meeting times. Credit: Google

Google has launched an experimental feature for its Calendar Web application that applies the company's considerable expertise in search to the problem of scheduling meetings. The feature, Smart Rescheduler, allows users to select a meeting that needs to be rescheduled and get suggestions about the best alternative times.

Product manager Ken Norton explains that in the calendar team's surveys of executive administrative assistants, rescheduling was typically a painful, time-consuming task. Norton says that watching administrators "horse-trade" conference rooms, flip through executive calendars, and try to predict the effects of rescheduling a single meeting led the team to believe automation must be able to help somehow.

Google's programmers decided to treat scheduling as a search problem--analogous to finding flights or shopping for products. The Smart Rescheduler takes into account factors such as time zones, available conference rooms, and people who need to attend the meeting, and provides a list of candidate times, ranked by factors such as whether a time is within working hours, whether it is accessible to all attendees, and whether it requires additional rescheduling.

If a conflicting meeting includes many of the same players as the meeting that's being rescheduled, Smart Rescheduler may include the suggestion that the conflicting event could also be rescheduled. A user can also refine the tool by marking certain people as optional or changing the planned length of the meeting. The technology used to rank meeting times is partly borrowed from Google's existing IP and partly built from scratch, Norton says. Smart Rescheduler only works if all participants in a meeting use Google Calendar and if they share availability information with each other. As a result, it's intended mainly for use within a company.

Though it's currently available only as an experimental feature in Calendar Labs, Smart Rescheduler clearly fits into Google's plan to broaden its appeal to enterprise users. In particular, Norton boasted about how the feature demonstrates the power of cloud computing for enterprise. Norton says that the processing required for the ranking algorithms would be too slow if they had to run on a user's local machine--and he didn't miss the opportunity to compare the speed of searching e-mail in Gmail to the speed (or lack thereof) when performing the same search within Outlook.

He also touted Google's ability to release a feature that business users can try just by opting in, without having to upgrade any software.

Google just announced that Tasks will be the first feature to graduate from Gmail Labs to become a default feature for all Gmail users.

Gmail Labs, which launched about a year ago, holds a collection of experimental additions to Gmail that users can try out by enabling them within their Gmail's settings. It also provides an interesting window into Google's application development philosophy.

Tasks provides a to-do list within Gmail optimized for mobile access and integration with Google Calendar. Senior product manager Keith Coleman says that the decision to add it to the main product was partly based on how many users had signed up to try it and how many have continued to use it. Coleman adds that a handful of other Labs experiments will likely graduate in the near future.

At first, Google wasn't sure if Labs would be a viable way to test features for Gmail, Coleman says, in part due to the technical complications that it introduces. You see, the system generates a different JavaScript codebase for each Gmail user based on which Labs products she has enabled. Since Gmail launched 51 Labs experiments in the past year, there are an astronomical number of possible Gmail builds--far too many to test internally.

But Google considers the experiment a success--so much that the company expanded the system by introducing Google Calendar Labs today. Calendar Labs will offer experimental features such as a time-zone gadget and the ability to track whether friends are free or busy.

Since Google has dropped the famous "beta" tag from many of its applications, Labs gives the company a way to keep the product evolving without disrupting customers who depend on it for business reasons, says Ken Norton, senior product manager for Google Calendar.

While Gmail Labs is known for some quirky widgets, like Mail Goggles (jokingly designed to stop embarrassing late-night e-mails), it also supports efforts to appeal to business customers. Calendar Labs will permit third-party developers to make their own adjustments to Calendar, allowing businesses to make necessary customizations, Norton says. This feature is only designed for use within a particular company: there's no way to make these outside features publicly available. A similar trick is possible in Gmail Labs, Coleman says.