Today, we’re finally delivering on your desire. We’d love to tell you about the center of our new scheduling user interface.

Upon creating your event, you see our new calendar UI for selecting times.

It does all the things you’d expect for selecting times, like clicking to add times and dragging time blocks to change a proposed time. You can change the duration of your event by resizing the time block. You can propose up to 3 times, since as before, guests are allowed to pick from 3 times to indicate their availability from the times you choose.

The gray areas are the times you have already booked, so you can now see what times should not be proposed (unless you want to). Combine this with the ability to sync with Google Calendar and now you have an up-to-date view of your availability when scheduling.

Oh, there’s a nifty thing that Presdo does. If you don’t want to poke through the calendar to look for free times, let Presdo do it for you. On the home page, you can still type in a phrase for a time window, like “Friday”. Presdo uses its Time Suggestion Engine to suggest 3 suitable times for you based on your availability, spreading out times to give guests some good choices to pick from. Of course, you can fine tune those times before sending the event to guests.

All these things go toward making scheduling even easier.

We’ve gather a lot of detailed feedback over the years, and out of all this feedback, we are re-thinking and streamlining the process to make scheduling faster and easier than ever. This release is the first of many enhancements around the calendar to come in our quest to make Presdo more usable and useful to more people. More to come!

We’re not the first to have a contact importer, but we promise the world’s easiest… and it’s now built into Presdo.

Here’s a quick run-through of how it works.

You’ll see a small link next to the WHO section on any event page to start importing contacts:

Click this link, and it will redirect you to Google to give permission for Presdo to access your Google contacts.

Your contacts will become available in Presdo within a few seconds.

And, whenever you want to use new contacts which Google has added for you since the last import, just go to the Contacts tab of Presdo’s settings page, and click the “Update Now” button.

You can import contacts from all Google and Google Apps accounts.

We promised it was easy.

How about this? Would you like to be able to use Presdo without signing up for it first? We’ve heard from many of you who say that with so many web services today, you have to sign up before you can use them. It takes time, we know, in this fast ‘tweeting world.

To save you the time so you can get to the good stuff in Presdo, we’ve added the ability to sign in with Google. (In technical jargon, we added support for OpenID.) Now, you won’t need to sign up first to use Presdo.

On Presdo’s sign in box or sign up page, just opt to sign in with Google instead. Presdo will redirect you to a Google page where you give Presdo permission to use your sign in. Seconds later, you’ll be brought back to Presdo as a full-fledged user ready to go.

Best of all, it works with both regular Google and Google Apps accounts. That was easy.

Up until now, Presdo has been a great tool for people who organize all of their events within the app.  But let’s face it, a lot of people already use calendars, and until now, there was no good way to get people’s schedules into Presdo.  Presdo was sometimes considered an unreachable island of functionality, however great it might have been once you got here!

Some users suggested that we create a one-time calendar importer function to manage the gap, but given the dynamically changing nature of people’s calendars, we knew that wasn’t good enough.  The Presdo team has invested considerable effort to create a syncing capability that we would be proud of, and we’d like to take you on a brief tour of it.

Works with Your Availability

What does syncing with Google Calendar give you?  Briefly, you can now use Presdo to schedule events with your availability in mind.  When you schedule a Presdo event in your desired time window, Presdo offers multiple times from this time window to your guests to gather responses.  With sync, there’s a new and valuable twist.

Let’s say you’re traveling and will be in town to meet with someone on Thursday, and you’re trying to set up some meetings for Thursday.

Before syncing, the times that would be suggested for Thursday were only scheduled around other events you already had on Presdo.  Without information about your availability, Presdo suggests times spread throughout Thursday to your guests:

With Google Calendar sync, Presdo now has access to your calendar and events and knows not to suggest times during which you are unavailable.  Let’s say you have already booked meetings between 9-10:30am and 1:30 to 3:30 Thursday.  On your new event, Presdo now suggests only times that are still available to guests:

See how the times suggested to guests take note of your availability?  Cool, huh?

One View Inside Your Google Calendar

What we’ve described so far is only one half of the new sync feature.

The syncing capability continuously updates any changes in both directions.  When you confirm a specific time for an event on Presdo, your event is automatically placed on your Google Calendar:

The events that you schedule using Presdo are placed onto a separate and personalized calendar that you are automatically subscribed to called “Presdo Events”.  This way, you can clearly distinguish between the events coming from Presdo versus your own Google Calendar events.

And as you might expect, if you reschedule the times for Presdo events, they get automatically updated in Google Calendar.  Many of you have asked for the ability to automatically save events and change them on your calendar, and we’re very happy to finally deliver this capability to you.

Other Cool Things

• Events before and after – since Presdo now has access to your Google Calendar, it does some cool things to make the overall scheduling experience better.Whenever you see specific times being proposed inside Presdo, you will see a simple pop-up that shows your agenda for that day.

  

  The day agenda shows your events before and after the time in question so you have better context to decide whether it’s a good time that’s being proposal.

• Works with multiple Google Calendars – Since any Google account can subscribe to more than one Google Calendar at a time, such as a work and family calendar, you can also sync Presdo with any selection of the calendars you have access to, so you can control the availability that Presdo sees for you.When you set up syncing, just choose which calendars you want to sync:

  

   

• Works with Google Apps – finally, our syncing feature works for both normal Google accounts as well as with calendars inside Google Apps accounts, so it’s great for professional users using Google Apps.

With sync with Google Calendar, we believe Presdo will benefit a whole new audience of users already using Google Calendar to keep track of their schedules.  You now have an easy-to-use, collaborative tool that works with your Google Calendar to find the best time for group events.

So give it a spin, and get started here!  More information about our sync feature can be found in our help.

We look forward to your feedback on the new feature!

• Presdo now notifies you and your guests on the day event(s) happens. Presdo used to send notifications the day before, but we’ve made this behavior more familiar so that no one forgets about the event on the day of the event.

• Presdo used to notify you on events that need your action, whether responding to an event you were invited to or confirming a final time. Whenever there’s an event in this category, we now bring this category of events forward so that it is the very first part of the notification. This way, you won’t be missing invites requiring your attention.

• Whenever Presdo sends you a notification caused by the above reasons, Presdo also tells you about events that might be coming up in the next few days—if there are any. Normally, Presdo won’t bother you with these events until the day of, but sometimes it’s helpful to be reminded a couple times of such upcoming events several days in advance just in case.

We’re very happy with these improvements. They are built on top of an existing slick reminder feature that combines all the day’s events into one message, delivered to you before the start of the day when they happen.

So, don’t worry about forgetting, since Presdo reminders will be here to help!

To use Presdo with Google Chrome, make sure you have the latest version of Chrome, which is at least 2.0.172.39.  To find out how to update Chrome, check here.

Thanks to our users who recently pointed this out to us.

Of course, we continue to support Presdo on the latest versions of IE, Firefox and Safari.

In keeping with our approach of simplicity, there is actually nothing to configure to use the new reminders feature.  All events are instantly enabled for reminders.  Here’s how it works.

The day before any event you have scheduled, Presdo sends you an email reminding you of the upcoming event.  If you have multiple events on that day, these events are grouped into the same notification message so you see your upcoming events at a glance.

Need to reschedule an event because something suddenly came up?  The reminder provides an easy way to get to the events by providing links to each event so you can reschedule them easily.

Worried that your guests need a reminder for your event too?  No problem.  Presdo automatically sends your guests reminders for the same event too.  Maybe one of your guests hasn’t responded to your invite yet.  Presdo still sends them a reminder, and tells them that a reply is still needed.

We put a lot of thought into the reminders feature to make it just right.  Hopefully it will come in handy when the time is just right!

When you get invited to events or are notified about changes to events, Presdo automatically attaches an iCalendar event to the email that can be saved directly into your calendar.  Of course, the time of the event has to be set.  This iCalendar event not only includes the date and time, but also other details such as the location and who’s coming.

Some email programs even do cool things when they find attached iCalendar events.  If you’re a Gmail user, Gmail will automatically show you events from your Google Calendar before and after the Presdo event… right inside your email!

We hope you enjoy this little feature, which makes Presdo even better to use.

Presdo CEO Eric Ly will be participating on the following panels to discuss the future of GTD:

• A GTD Workforce – Is There a New Industry Standard – Thursday, 1:30 to 3pm
• The Virtual Workplace – Does it Work? – Thursday, 3:30 to 5pm
• Productivity Tech: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – Friday, 12:45 to 2:15pm

Since tools are our specialty, we look forward to the great insights about how technology can be made to help us all achieve the ideals of GTD.

We invite you to join these sessions and add to the lively debates.  See you there!