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April 12, 2006
Google Calendar has Landed
Better late than never, but Google Calendar has landed. And it's nice. Okay, very nice.Ze highlights:
- Gmail integration (in principle), especially the recognition of event info in email content;
- The spiffy interface;
- The atomized calendar sharing; and
- The outrageously cool English syntax for adding events ("Dinner with Steve tomorrow at 7pm" does what you think it should).
- Gmail integration (in practise), which is a little borked, with Calendar features discussed in Help not yet showing up in Gmail;
- Synch with Outlook, which is not continuous; and
- The apparent absence of some 30Boxes features, like smooth syndication.
[Update] Verdicts are generally positive about this new Google service, making it the best-received Google offering in some time. Even Om reluctantly likes it.
[Update^2] Matt Cutts has a great suggestion for a first Calendar bookmarklet:
... to let you select text on a web page and "QuickAdd" that event with smart parsing of the text. So in the post below, you could select "10 August 2006 Expected date of workshop" and click on the bookmarklet to add AIRWeb to your calendar in just a click or two.
Sphere It
| 
Digg it
| 
Bookmark it
| 
Stumble it
Very Nice. Missing two features:
1) Lables for calendar events
2) Outlook sync.
Otherwise, very cool
...I guess a task list would be nice as well
Am I asking for too much?
Dave
Very nice tool. Maybe Google will soon move into the ERP or the CRM space soon.
Apparently I'm not the only one who has had problems with time zone synching when importing calendar data from Outlook.
At least we now know that all of their QA people are on the west coast!
Agreed on time zone issue. I imported my outlook calendar and it moved everything ahead 2 hours (I'm CST). How can I mass delete!!
One feature G Cal has that it takes a while to get, is the notion of "My Calendars" - they are used in a analogous way to folders in email in that they partition classes of events.
I.e. you create a Calendar for each class of events, then you can overlay them.
- Piano Lessons
- Golf times
- Baseball Games
- Lunch Meetings
- Vacation travel
etc...
I've found this very useful.
Once you experiment with them, they seem quite revolutionary. I don't know if anyone had them before Google.
The only way to "mass delete" is to do exactly that - delete your entire calendar. This also requires that you delete your entire Google Calendar account. Fun.
For those of us who are (begrudgingly) tied to Outlook, the implications for calendar syncing seem to be rather less than promising. If you could at least do a full "overwrite" import from Outlook that would help, but it would mean you'd still be tied to Outlook for scheduling new events.
So despite all the snazzy AJAXy UI wizardry, the functionality and data integration shortcomings seem to be pretty significant. I'm sure this will all improve shortly (perhaps even today given that Calendar seems to have been down for most of the day), but ... I'm still curious as to: 1) how this made it to a public release already, and 2) what their "pre-alpha" testing process might possibly be.
Am I the only one who's rather less than overwhelmed here? For a $120B company, this strikes me as a little JV. (Then again, it's a hell of a lot better than the first release of Windows Live, although that doesn't say much.)
I agree with John K. The ability to have different calendars, all with different colors showing on the same base calendar is a great advantage. Plus by choosing "Agenda" for the individual calendars, you get only those specific entries -- not all entries.
Hi,
if you want to sync both ways between Outlook and Google Calendar, try RemoteCalendars plugin for Outlook 2003!
http://sourceforge.net/projects/remotecalendars
Here is a video explaining how to set everything correctly ;)
http://remotecalendars.sourceforge.net/google.htm
One more minor complaint: I can't limit the display to just few hours of the day (like 8am - 10pm). I hate using the scrollbar :)
Also, the options for recurring events are very well thought out.