How many times have you tried to arrange a meeting between a group of people and as a result found yourself in the middle of an e-mail storm as everyone responds with their own constraints that you have to correlate to find the best fit. The answer to your problem might well be a really clever Web application called When Is Good.

When you want to schedule a new event WIG presents a calendar grid and you can select the date range and overall hours to view as well as the resolution (15 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes or whole days). You can also optionally select which time zone you are in. Within that view you can then select which time slots you would like to make available in which the meeting could be scheduled.

When you’re ready to invite others to set their availabilities you click on “Create Event.” If you aren’t registered on When Is Good you’ll be given a code that allows you to see the results. Next you are given a URL to send to the other participants along with the full results URL and another URL to edit the event details. If you’re registered all of these details will be saved in your account and you can enable e-mail notifications of responses.

When the other participants visit the URL they can select which days and times they are available from the set selected by the organizer and optionally add a comment.

The results view displays the names of all respondents and hovering your mouse over their name displays the times they selected and any comment they added. Clicking on a respondent’s name excludes their selections from the overall availability analysis.

The user interface presentation is AJAX driven and a lot of thought and talent went into making it simple and responsive, and considering that despite how complex it is it appears to be mostly bug free. The only problem I found was selecting a resolution of days and selecting and saving a range of dates that crossed a month boundary (June 26, 2008 to July 1, 2008) resulted in only the last selected date being shown.

Here’s an event I set up: try it out as an attendee. If you want to have your own account registration is free.

When Is Good offers a premium plan for 180UKP that allows you to brand your service and it promises more premium services in the future. I would hope that some larger company such as Google or Yahoo would buy its intellectual property and use it to enhance another personal productivity service – for example, Google Calendar would benefit enormously from this service.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.