Multiple Calendars Online and Shared

Use the Google calendar to manage your schedule and share it with others selectively using RSS and ICAL feeds. This way, you can skip having to synchronize the data with all your PIM databases

Thursday, June 08, 2006

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You use a dozen different devices from your workstations to the PDAs, with different schedule managers in each. At work, it's probably your e-mail client that doubles up for the job, and at home or in your PDA, you have other software. The challenge before you is to have identical calendar data in each, without the hassle of manually synching them (which is prone to forgetful memories). Google

Calendar is an online centralized way to achieve this, without necessarily sacrificing the existing schedule managers you use. This calendar lets you import (no export as yet) calendars from any PIM in ICAL or CSV format and use the resulting calendar from any device that can read XML off the Internet. To start with, go to http://calendar.google.com and sign in with your Gmail account. On the screen you start off by specifying a name and description for your calendar. Doing so will enable others search and locate your calendar and events easily.

1	Selecting 'Do not share with everyone' makes your calendar private, though you can still give people selective access using the 'Add a new person' section	2	In the 'Manage calendars' screen at the bottom of the 'My calendars' box, you can create a number of calendars as well as add other people's calendars
3	You can set up how you wish to be notified (e-mail/pop-up) about upcoming appointments and schedule events	4	Export the information from your existing PIM and use the 'Select File' field in this screen to upload it to Google
5	Enter information about the calendar event (schedule item). If you enter some names in the Guests box, Google will invite them and manage their accept/reject messages	6	Use the Agenda view to see a snapshot of all upcoming events, in a particular calendar or across all of them. Each calendar's events are color-coded
7	The regular calendar view will list each calendar's event in a different color. You can set up your own color scheme too	8	Copy the URL to the RSS feed from the Public/Private feeds on the Settings>General page into RSS feed readers
9	The feed reader can help you do further things with the calendar event, like blogging it to your corporate blog	10	When other invitees to your events accept or reject the invitation, the status becomes visible here immediately

Sujay V Sarma

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