Patent ID: 7693736

Claim:
A computer-implemented method, comprising: identifying, by a recurring meeting manager residing on a server or communication endpoint, participants of a recurring meeting; receiving, from a user, input at the recurring meeting manager, the input indicating a user-desired periodicity of the recurring meeting, the user-desired periodicity comprising one or more of: a desired day of week, a desired week of month, a desired day of month, and a desired time of day; defining, by the recurring meeting manager, a minimum required availability criteria for the participants in association with the recurring meeting; determining, by the recurring meeting manager, an individual threshold for availability associated with each participant; determining, by the recurring meeting manager, an overall attendance threshold for the recurring meeting; analyzing, by the recurring meeting manager, a schedule of each participant included in the identified participants; identifying, by the recurring meeting manager, at least a first occurrence in the recurring meeting and at least a second occurrence in the recurring meeting, wherein the at least a first occurrence and the at least a second occurrence satisfy the individual threshold of each participant and the overall attendance threshold, and wherein the at least a second occurrence differs from the user desired periodicity and also differs from the at least a first occurrence in one or more of: the desired day of week, the desired week of month, the desired day of month, and the desired time of day; and performing, by the recurring meeting manager, either of the following substeps: (i) ranking, by the recurring meeting manager, the at least a first occurrence and the at least a second occurrence in a ranked list and then providing the ranked list to the user, wherein the user to selects at least one of the at least a first occurrence and the at least a second occurrence from the list; and (ii) selecting, by the recurring meeting manager, at least one of the at least a first occurrence and the at least a second occurrence, based on a predefined relative ranking of the at least a first occurrence and the at least a second occurrence; wherein the selected at least one of the at least a first occurrence and the selected at least a second occurrence have a first periodicity that is within a predetermined threshold of the user-desired periodicity, and wherein the first periodicity is non-uniform.