Scheduling group meetings requires access to participants' calendars, typically located in scattered pockets or desks. Placing participants' calendars on-line and using a rule-based scheduler to find a time slot would alleviate the problem to some extent, but it often is difficult to trust the results, because correct scheduling rules are elusive, varying with the participants and the agenda of a particular meeting. What's needed is a comprehensive scheduling system that summarizes the available information for quick, flexible, and reliable scheduling. We have developed a prototype of a priority-based, graphical scheduling system called Visual Scheduler (VS).A controlled experiment comparing automatic scheduling with VS to manual scheduling demonstrated the former to be faster and less error prone. A field study conducted over six weeks at the UNC-CH Computer Science Department showed VS to be a generally useful system and provided valuable feedback on ways to enhance the functionality of me system to increase its value as a groupwork tool. In particular, users found priority-based timeslots and access to scheduling decision reasoning advantageous. VS has been in use by more than 75 faculty, staff, and graduate students since Fall 1987.

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The Envoy Framework addresses a need for computer-based assistants or agents that operate in conjunction with users' existing applications, helping them perform tedious, repetitive, or time-consuming tasks more easily and efficiently. Envoys carry out missions for users by invoking envoy-aware applications called operatives and inform users of mission results via envoy-aware applications called informers. The distributed, open architecture developed for Envoys is derived from an analysis of the best characteristics of existing agent systems. This architecture has been designed as a model for how agent technology can be seamlessly integrated into the electronic desktop. It defines a set of application programmer's interfaces so that developers may convert their software to envoy-aware applications. A subset of the architecture described in this paper has been implemented in an Envoy Framework prototype.

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