What was Sunrise
Sunrise was a great Calendar app, if not the best (disclaimer I was a fan). It originally launched in 2012 as a newsletter of your daily events you’d get in the morning… at sunrise. It then re-launched in 2013 as an iPhone calendar, before expanding to all other platforms.
Sunrise Meet
Last year, Sunrise made its first foray in the scheduling space by launching Sunrise Meet. Sunrise Meet was a simple way to schedule 1-on-1 meetings.
On the desktop version of Sunrise, you’d need to click the Meet button, pick a duration and click around in your calendar to pick a few time slots. You’d then get a link that you could paste in an email or a chat. Your recipient would click that link, see the times suggested and select their favorite one. That would confirm the meeting and put it in everyone’s calendar.
On mobile, the workflow to schedule a meeting with Sunrise was really innovative as it involved a custom keyboard, displaying your calendar. While very clever, this proved pretty annoying for many multilingual users as the custom keyboard was pretty slow to load.
Microsoft acquisition
Wait, why are you talking in the past tense? Because unfortunately for its users (but fortunately for the team, congrats to them!) Sunrise got acquired by Microsoft in 2015 for an undisclosed amount (Techcrunch reported $100M though). At time of acquisition, Microsoft, reassured Sunrise’ users that they would continue to run in as a separate product and brand. But lLast fall Microsoft announced that it would actually end up shutting shut down the service. And that is what is happening now. With Sunrise sunsetting, it’s time for its user to find an alternative to Sunrise Meet.
Why Vyte is the best replacement for Sunrise Meet for 1-on-1 meetings?
While great, Sunrise meet had one downside: you had to manually select times for every 1-on-1 meeting. At Vyte, we believe that it’s much easier to just make your availability public. And by availability, we only really mean your aggregated availability. What you do, where you do it, or whom you do it with will always stay private to you. You can also fine tune which calendars to use, and set up weekly availability patterns.
To share your availability, you just need to create your Vyte page in a few seconds by connecting your Google calendar to Vyte. Creating your page is free and you can accept as many meeting requests for free with it. We also have a paid plan that adds many pro features that Sunrise Meet never had.
Just give your link to people you want to meet with (we also have have a button handy for your website or your email signature) and they can pick a few time slots that work for them. You then receive an email or a push notification on your iPhone to confirm the meeting in 2 clicks. The meeting is added to your calendar and your invitee receives a confirmation email with a calendar attachment. You can also enable people to select only 1 slot in which case the meeting is immediately confirmed.
Vyte goes further with group meeting
1-on-1 meetings are great, but what about meetings with more people? Was it possible to schedule group meetings with Sunrise Meet? No it wasn’t.
But don’t worry we got you covered. With Vyte you can easily schedule a meeting with multiple participants in one go. Just select invitees from your contacts, suggest a few date from a view of your calendar, and send your meeting.
Your invitees get an email with your suggestions, from which they can vote.
Just confirm the meeting and we sync your calendar and send confirmation emails with calendar invites to your invitees.
Do you need to also decide on a place? To reschedule? To work seamlessly across timezones? We do that too.
Login with your Google calendar and schedule your first meeting with Vyte now.