Organizing a group meeting can be difficult. Not only does it require the organizer to stop whatever it is he or she is currently engaged in, it also requires that organizer to attempt to reconcile the schedules of several people into one coherent mass. That was a lot of time lost out of the total system, and all in a bid to get everyone together and talking. There have been some attempts to correct this--one of the best, reportedly, was Tungle.me, but its acquisition by BlackBerry (News - Alert) back when it was Research In Motion put paid to that concept for a while. A new challenger has entered the field, and Atlas is out to make scheduling a whole lot easier.

Much of Atlas' functions reportedly match those offered by the now-lost Tungle.me, but one particular advantage has emerged with Atlas that wasn't there for even Tungle.me: mobile functionality. Atlas can go on the road, allowing users to set up meetings and the like while waiting at an appointment or the like, or even while out having lunch.

The interface is sharp and visually appealing--though this measure is somewhat subjective--and offers a lot of collaboration tools while also compiling the results of that collaboration into usable schedules. Atlas allows users to show calendars, though not necessarily the entire calendar, to other users so the crowd looking to get in on the meeting can tell where the best dates are. The respondents then add input to the calendar--the best date, a good fallback or two, and dates that are just right out--and the results are compiled from there to find the optimal date for all the participants.

Atlas works with several current calendar platforms, from Google (News - Alert) Calendar and iCal to newer calendars like Sunrise and Tempo. Calendars set up on the mobile devices will have both read and write privileges according to Atlas, so getting everyone on the same page should be easier than ever. Better yet, this can all be set up directly on the app itself so having to pass e-mails around is much less necessary--and less useful--than before.

Perhaps best of all is that Atlas is free to use, at least on the basic level. Atlas plans to go to a monthly subscription bases--about $5 a month at last report--but subscriptions will come with "deeper, more advanced scheduling features" as well as some assorted other surprises to make throwing that $60 a year in the pot worth the while. The folks behind Atlas, meanwhile, expressed the hope that the users would take an active role in making clear what was needing to be added. It's hoped, in fact, that this will be much like Evernote (News - Alert), with the basic version valuable in its own right and the pay version proving valuable to those power users who need the extra features.

There are reports of a down side here in that the Web interface isn't quite up to snuff, but that will likely improve the farther along we go. Since the mobile version is free anyway, this is a hurdle that can be worked around.

Scheduling people for a meeting isn't easy. Trying to reconcile the various holes in everybody's schedule to get a date that works well for everyone evokes images of trying to get several cats together in one room. But with a simple, graphically-heavy interface like the kind Atlas is packing, getting everyone together for a discussion is now an easier enterprise than it was previously.