Google Calendar
I imported some things into Google Calendar (Beta) today. As with any beta product, there are some pros and cons.
For a while, I was using iCal as a handy-dandy way to access my calendar anywhere/share my calendar. Then it got to be a pain. In order to update iCal, I had to sync with my Palm, which I then had to sync with my Mac, which then sync’d with iCal. All my
categories got messed up and it was just awful. Since I acquired my Blackberry, I have my latest calendar everywhere on my mobile device, but an online calendar allows me to share events and such with others.
Enter Google Calendar – I’m calling it gCal. It has all sorts of nifty features, not the least of which is the nice idea that my husband and I can update each other’s calendars with the right permissions and I can remind him of events via email or SMS. I like that I can selectively add people to view everything (who wants to see my private appointments after all?) but I can allow people to see the details of specific events to which they are invited, even though the rest of the calendar just reads as free/busy.
For corporate use, a company could set up a public event calendar.
They could put a button on their web site and users could automatically
download the event onto their own gCal. There are definitely some
professional as well as personal uses for this.
gCal has some nifty settings. The one thing I don’t like is that they are pushing you to migrate
from Outlook/iCal/etc. That isn’t going to happen. Whether on a Mac or
a PC, people like the idea of being able to sync their calendar
application to their Palm/mobile device. As far as I can tell, I can’t
sync gCal. In fact, I had to export my calendar from Outlook and import
it into gCal. It doesn’t automatically sync with your local calendar
app either. I see that as a major shortcoming. I will basically have to
enter events twice – once on Outlook and once on gCal if I want
everyone to be aware of an event. So that’s sort of a pain.
Obviously they have some kinks to work out, but its a good start.
By the way, if I’ve missed something (as some of the features are
buried), and there really is a way to SYNC (not import/export) gCal
with Outlook and/or a mobile device (such as a Blackberry), please let me know.
Related Links: Google Blog: Its About Time
Technorati Tags: google calendar, gcal
virtualworkerjoe
April 27th, 2006 at 3:26 pm #
There are some folks trying to get a sync working in our spare time – should be up early next week. You can check my blog for updates – Google may release their own sync soon.