Now I know the answer: Zurich. As in Switzerland. Banerjee is going to be the Chief Technology Officer of the Swiss industrial-tech giant ABB.

What is ABB? I don’t know very much about it, either. But it has popped up on my radar screen in the past. In 2010, when I wrote this Bloomberg Businessweek story about the Stuxnet worm that targeted computers involved in the control of industrial equipment, I learned that several companies make programmable logic controllers and other gear that might in theory be attacked by a Stuxnet-like worm. ABB is one of them.

That’s not exactly a headline for what the company does. It’s actually pretty big. It has 134,000 employees around the world, and has been in existence for almost 130 years. It specializes in heavy power-management gear and automation equipment that is used in industrial settings.

ABB announced the news in a press release that hit the wires overnight, and which I have shared below:

ABB appoints Prith Banerjee to Executive Committee as Chief Technology Officer

Banerjee to join ABB from Hewlett Packard, to start new role midyear 2012

Zurich, Switzerland, April 5, 2012 – ABB, the leading power and automation technology group, has appointed Prith Banerjee to its Executive Committee in the role of Chief Technology Officer. Banerjee, 51, will start midyear 2012 and will be based in Zurich.

He joins ABB from Hewlett Packard, where he was Senior Vice President of Research and Director of HP Labs. Prior to that, Banerjee was Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, as well as Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Banerjee has also held senior positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at Northwestern University. In 2000, he founded AccelChip, Inc., a developer of products and services for electronic design automation that was acquired by Xilinx in 2006. He succeeds Peter Terwiesch, who became head of ABB in Germany and manager of ABB’s Central Europe region in July 2011.

“Prith is a creative and entrepreneurial researcher and executive with a wealth of experience in the business and academic worlds,” said Joe Hogan, ABB’s chief executive officer. “He is well placed to help ABB build on its heritage of technology innovation and leadership.”

Banerjee has a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana.

ABB (www.abb.com) is a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve their performance while lowering environmental impact. The ABB Group of companies operates in around 100 countries and employs about 135,000 people.

Over the past nine months, my first-grader’s school has seen that in spades. Like many elementary schools, ours relies on parent volunteers to help out with one-on-one reading with students and math exercises. In my 6-year-old’s class, at least two parent volunteers are needed a day. In the past, volunteers were organized the old-fashioned way on paper, with parents signing up for their preferred time slots for the month on a calendar sent home with their children.

But in recent years as more schools and families have gone digital, parents are opting for an online solution to organizing volunteer class time. And a host of volunteering and calendar services have popped up on the Web to oblige them. When I asked our school’s room parent which online sites people were using to organize volunteering, he blasted out an email to poll his network of room parents. The informal survey yielded one conclusion: Each classroom was using different services, each with their own perks and drawbacks. Among the hodge-podge of choices were well-known applications such as Yahoo Inc.’s Yahoo Groups and Google Inc.’s Calendar, as well as less familiar names including VolunteerSpot Inc.’s VolunteerSpot and Doodle AG’s Doodle.com.

All are easily accessible on the Web and are free (though some charge a fee for premium users). All allow a central organizer to set up a master calendar or group online and invite other people to join, thereby getting everyone onto the same technological platform.

VolunteerSpot lets an organizer create a calendar, with tasks parents could volunteer to do.

Each also has limitations. Some make it difficult to print a volunteer schedule. Others don’t have automatic reminders to notify a participant that their volunteer session is coming up, or they make it tough to export the calendar to be integrated with, say, your calendar at work.

Of all the technologies our school’s parents are using, Yahoo’s Groups has been around the longest. Launched in 1999, Yahoo says it now hosts more than 10 million groups that are accessed by some 120 million members. Signing up to create a Yahoo Group is a breeze—with a few clicks, people can name a group and invite others to join. Once set up, parents can post comments, send photos and other attachments to the group, and sign up for spots with an integrated calendar application. Over the years, Yahoo has added new features, including tools to help build an event and to gather RSVPs.

But some parents complain that using a Yahoo Group creates unnecessary spam when some people forget they’re communicating with a group instead of one on one. In addition, Groups’ calendar application is difficult to import and export. Yahoo says that later this year, it will roll out a refresh of Groups that will “enable smaller groups to do things more efficiently.”

Google Calendar, launched in 2007, got a fresh new look for the application last month. The application is also easy to create and to invite people to join. Other parents can share the calendar, see at a glance what volunteer spots are available and fill in the ones they want. Reminders are built in, and Google Calendar can sync with Microsoft Outlook or other calendaring systems.

One of our school’s first-grade classes, though, faced a hurdle when it came to joining their Google Calendar. Some parents said they couldn’t join because they didn’t have a Gmail email account and didn’t want to jump through the hoops of creating one. Google says people don’t have to have a Gmail account but adds there is often confusion between a Gmail account and a plain-vanilla Google account, which only requires people to enter a username and password.

No such puzzlement should exist with Doodle.com, which doesn’t ask users for their email. Launched in 2003 by a developer in Zurich, Doodle.com allows people to quickly get on a calendar, select dates and times for an event, then send out the link so people can fill in when they want to volunteer. But Doodle.com is designed primarily for setting up a business meeting, the company says. Organizing a month’s worth of classroom volunteers thus requires clicking each specific date to create a volunteer spot for it. In other services, you can bring up a month’s calendar. Printing out a Doodle.com calendar also entails someone first exporting the calendar to a PDF or an Excel spreadsheet.

One parent, who is a Doodle.com fan, says she finds the application is better used to organize one-off events such as a school field trip rather than maintaining an ongoing volunteer calendar.

VolunteerSpot was launched early last year by entrepreneur Karen Bantuveris, who says she was aggravated with the lack of tools to solve volunteer-coordinating problems at her child’s preschool. VolunteerSpot allows an organizer to create a calendar, use a tool called the planning wizard to choose tasks they need people to volunteer for, and then send the link out so people can chime in for what slots they can fill.

VolunteerSpot has gotten mixed reviews from our first-grade class. While our parent-volunteer coordinator said the website is very “usable”—with reminders automatically sent two days before a volunteer session, among other things—it was less smooth in some areas.

VolunteerSpot doesn’t allow people to see a month’s worth of volunteers at a glance; people have to click on each day to see who is volunteering, for instance. Printing a calendar isn’t easy. When I clicked on our class calendar, I could print out only my volunteer slots and not the entire class’s since I wasn’t the calendar’s administrator.

My first-grader’s teacher was particularly frustrated by those things since they prevented her from easily seeing who was volunteering when and from printing out a calendar to prompt laggards to volunteer. She says it meant she often had to bug our parent-volunteer coordinator for updates and to make changes to the calendar.

Ms. Bantuveris says the site is constantly adding features and that more than one person can be a calendar’s administrator, which allows them to make changes to a calendar’s settings. She adds that the site in February added an option allowing an administrator print out a master calendar.

Still, there’s one thing these technologies can’t overcome: parental resistance. One of our school’s first-grade classes started the academic year with VolunteerSpot—but quickly abandoned it. Instead, they switched to a paper calendar. “We just couldn’t get anyone to sign up online,” says the room parent for that class. With a paper calendar, she adds, the volunteering has gone much more smoothly.

Walter S. Mossberg will return June 10.

Write to Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@wsj.com

Microsoft and the European Commission have canceled a face-to-face hearing in an antitrust case pending against the company over a scheduling dispute, of all things. Seems Microsoft is unhappy with the date of the hearing, which it says falls during a time when key senior regulators will be unable to attend. “The dates the Commission selected for our hearing, June 3-5, coincide with the most important worldwide intergovernmental competition law meeting, the International Competition Network meeting,” Dave Heiner, vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. “As a result, it appears that many of the most influential Commission and national competition officials with the greatest interest in our case will be in Zurich and so unable to attend our hearing in Brussels.”

Microsoft (MSFT) asked the EC to reschedule. It refused, claiming June 3-5 are the only dates that a suitable room is available in Brussels for a hearing. Which is, of course, ridiculous. But no more so than Microsoft’s argument that the hearing will suffer from the absence of European decision-makers, says Thomas Vinje, counsel for Opera, a complainant in the case. Because, in all likelihood, those folks wouldn’t have attended anyway. “Such people simply don’t attend such hearings, and Microsoft knows it,” Vinje told the Financial Times. “The undoubted truth must simply be that Microsoft is afraid of facing the questions and evidence it would face from the Commission and from those aligned against it.”