Online calendars

This is a very long and not-very-engaging post about online calendars. Feel free to skip!

I’ve been looking for a good online calendar for ages. At work I use Microsoft Outlook, and make sure all my daily appointments are listed in the Outlook calendar. Many of the people I work with also use Outlook, so it’s simple enough for us to use as a tool for making appointments and setting up meetings and other events.

There’s a slight problem however, in that a large percentage of the people I provide library services to, use Novell’s GroupWise email client. (Within the one organisation. Don’t ask me why this is so, I don’t know.) GroupWise and Outlook don’t talk to each other – I can’t set up an Outlook calendar and share it with GroupWise users. This means that unless I maintain two calendars, an Outlook one and a GroupWise one, one set of people is going to miss out on having easy access to my daily schedule. Unfortunately it is the GroupWise users have missed out, mainly because I don’t have daily access to the GroupWise client and have to use the webmail client, which is slow and clunky.

I simply can’t justify manually entering each Outlook appointment into GroupWise. In any case I have never been able to maintain more than one calendar successfully. When I first started work I had both a paper diary and the Outlook calendar. It didn’t take long for one calendar to get out of sync – usually the paper diary. After a while I gave up on the paper diary, and have stuck to using Outlook ever since. (At home I do maintain a paper diary – a Moleskine day-to-a-page diary – but I don’t note appointments in it, it’s for observations, thoughts etc; I have to indulge my pen and paper fetish somewhere!)

I used to have a PDA (a Compaq iPAQ 3970) which I kept neatly synced with all my appointments. It was very convenient to have a portable version of Outlook to carry around with me, but the PDA died a while ago and I just haven’t bothered to replace it. Obviously I am not mobile enough for the lack of a portable calendar to really hurt. I find I can usually remember my schedule for the next two days or so, and on those occasions where I need to make appointments days or weeks ahead, it’s easy enough to give the other person a call or send them an invitation when I get back to my office.

So it’s not the portable diary or scheduler that I really need – all I have been searching for is an online tool that will allow me to synch neatly with Outlook and just display my schedule, online, for my GroupWise clientele! It would make things much more efficient for them to be able to see when I am free for consultations or meetings or coffees… Just yesterday I discovered that I had been booked for a meeting by a GroupWise user who didn’t see any clashes in my GroupWise calendar for the time – setting up another meeting time is going to take a few emails because everybody else (all GroupWise users of course) had said okay to the proposed time.

So far I have tried three online calendars.

1. RSSCalendar.
• Pro:
• Easy to use.
• Seems stable (i.e. doesn’t crash or freeze).
• Can be easily embedded in a webpage for viewing, or friends can subscribe to the RSS feed.
• Con:
• Manual entry of appointments – no way of importing appointments from other calendars.
• No way of syncing.
• Limited interactivity with display (friends just view your calendar and cannot make changes or additions).

2. CalendarHub. This one seemed to have a lot of potential at first.
• Pro:
• Sharing a calendar is easy; you can ‘publish’ it and send anyone the associated URL.
• Importing appointments from other calendars is possible.
• People viewing your public calendar can suggest events to others.
• Con:
• Importing appointments doesn’t seem to work properly, for me anyway. Some appointments appeared on the wrong days. (This problem with importing was a major drawback for me – it was too frustrating to try to fix.)
• The site froze or crashed occasionally – meant you couldn’t keep working with the calendars.
• No way of syncing from other calendars.
• I didn’t particularly like the way the calendars looked but there weren’t many options for changing the appearance.
3. Google Calendar. New kid on the block. Has a lot of nice features the other two don’t have.
• Pro:
• No need to set up another account as I already have a Google account.
• Importing appointments possible. (And definitely worked better than CalendarHub – no errors!)
• Looks good, and relatively easy to change colours and viewing options.
• Can import a range of national holidays (eg so I can list Anzac Day). I like this!
• Can set to view free/busy – no details. Very nice!
• Con:
• Minor bug: sometimes when clicking to edit an appointment, this returns you the calendar view (in Firefox 1.5.0.2). Not a major irritant (yet).
• Sharing a calendar only via RSS (or iCal). You can invite people to view your calendar but I think you either need to invite them to set up a Google Calendar too, or you can invite them to specific appointments. I want a URL I can append to an email sig so my GroupWise folks can click on it to see my availability. I think others have mentioned this already, so wait and see, I guess.
• No syncing. [Update: Seems there is a way to sync Outlook with Google Calendar! Will have to check this out.]

While looking at people’s comments on Google Calendar yesterday, I realised I haven’t checked out one venerable calendar – Yahoo Calendar. The reviews and comparisons between the two are popping up everywhere: see Amit Agarwal’s Digital Inspiration for one review and pointers to others. Apparently Yahoo Calendar has the main feature I want – sharing of your calendar via webpage. Do I want to create yet another account with yet another organisation? (My Yahoo account lapsed months ago.)

Categories: calendars, Outlook, GroupWise, GoogleCalendar, RSSCalendar, CalendarHub, YahooCalendar