BRob On Tech

At first I was skeptical. Why in the world would I want to leave my cozy little world of Microsoft Outlook? I’ve got all of my information in there including appointments, notes, tasks (a la “Getting Things Done”), and email. It’s all in one place and it all synchronizes with my Treo 650.

But it is Google, which means to me that it’s at least worth a look. So I dug in. I exported my calendar from outlook to a .csv file and imported it into my new google calendar. This was very easy. I created a second calendar (my mother’s pocono house schedule) to see how it worked, and was pleased with the results. My new calendar was a different color, and its events were displayed in that color along with my personal calendar. Very cool. This is a bit better than Outlook. In outlook you can create multiple calendars, and you can view them side by side, but you can’t overlay multiple calendars in the same display (I don’t think).

In thinking about the utility of this new tool, I’ve come up with a few uses (for me anyway):

• personal calendar
• work calendar (shared)
• family calendar (shared)
• java user group calendar (public)
• friends calendar (shared)
• professional group calendar such as IEEE (public)

This is pretty cool. If my local java users group maintains a public calendar, I can search for it and add it to my display so I always know what events are happening on which dates. Additionally, with Google calendar people anywhere can see my free/busy information if they know where my calendar is.

So there is some value in this tool, but it’s still not worth it. I can’t use Google Calendar exclusively yet for the following reasons:

• Can’t easily synchronize with my Treo
• No task support
• No memo support

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.