SAAS Scheduling App Syncs with Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook

Obviously, inviters have to sign in to use TimeDriver to input a schedule and set up details and specifications for how they want the application to work. Users view a dashboard of scheduled activities and availability, where they may access activity and e-mail invitation wizards.

One of my favorite perks of TimeDriver is that it presents appointment times in the inviter's time zone, as well as presenting them in the invitee's time zone, if it's different from that of the inviter.

This is huge for me. As an East Coast journalist, two-thirds of my weekly briefings are with folks on the West Coast. I often find myself questioning whether or not I booked appointments in EDT or PDT. TimeDriver solves that issue for me.

Invitees may also ask questions of the inviters and see any message entered at the time the appointment was booked in the inviter's Outlook or Google calendar.

TimeDriver boasts other features, including the ability for Outlook users to send e-mail messages directly from Outlook with an embedded link to schedule a TimeDriver appointment. Users may send the e-mail the same way as any other Outlook e-mail or send and track the e-mail through TimeDriver.
 
The application also includes color coding in Outlook calendars to distinguish TimeDriver appointments from other tasks, chores or meetings.

What's the drawback? TimeDriver may port to Google Calendar, but Outlook is clearly favored here.

As you can tell from the latter two features, the application leverages Outlook for e-mailing, but not Google's Gmail. TimeDriver should be ported to Web mail applications, starting with Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Microsoft Live Mail, to be truly useful.

I imagine the application would be a dream for salespeople who have already gone to the cloudy side by embracing Salesforce.com, SugarCRM or other hosted SAAS applications.

And you can't beat free. Expect TimeTrade to monetize the application through some additional support services and, of course, the main way SAAS applications monetize when they don't charge per user: advertising.