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14 May 2006

Review: Google Calendar

By Giles Turnbull

Monday

1000: Meeting with boss. Need to find a suitable calendar system for the new team. Boss fails to turn up – meeting was not in his calendar.

1200: Second attempt. Boss wants new calendar system to support Exchange, Entourage, and Novell Evolution. Boss has also bought himself a MacBook Pro and wants it to work with iCal too.

1900: Still at work, everyone else has gone home. Want to kill self.

1924: Ohh. What’s this? Google Calendar? Hmmmm.

Tuesday

0800: Early start to investigate Google Calendar. So, what can this thing actually do? Turns out it’ll import iCalendar and CSV files exported from iCal or Outlook. A good start. All you need do is import into an existing calendar. Google Calendar looks quite a lot like iCal, to be honest, but that’s not a bad thing. In fact, the Google UI is a lot better than iCal’s, in my experience.

What a nice app

0915: Beginning to get the hang of this now. Each calendar within your Google Calendar (note: small c, Big C; there’s a difference) can be controlled independently of the others. Of the calendars I create, I can choose which ones are to be shared publicly, and which ones are not. Subscribing to public calendars is incredibly easy – search for whatever you’re interested in (Formula 1, XTech 2006), and if Google has a calendar for it, all you need to do is click “Add calendar.” So neat.

Subscribing to stuff

1430: Really loving this UI now. It’s got all the features you’d expect in a calendar, like different views for day, week, month, etc. But the search is fantastic, typically Google-fast and with very useful after-search functionality like “More details” and “View on my calendar.” Lovely. Boss is going to like this.

Google Calendar UI

Wednesday

1105: Been experimenting with using Google Calendar in meetings. The keyboard shortcuts are a real help, they’re pretty obvious (especially if you’ve already got a Gmail account) and the Quick Add feature – well, it’s just incredibly useful to be able to tap out something like “Team drinks 4pm tomorrow at Joe’s Bar,” and Google Calendar just automagically turns that into a meaningful event.

Sharing a calendar is quick

1650: The invitations feature could be great for managing group events, from more team drinks (we do seem to have a lot of those here…) to client visits. You can create a new event, then add the email addresses of people you want to invite. They can view the details, even make comments or ask questions. They don’t have to have a Google Calendar account of their own.

Thursday

0810: Last night I was bothered by the thought: what if one of us wants to code something to talk to Google Calendar? I needn’t have worried. There’s an API.

1340: Here’s the thing. Some people who have used Gmail will appreciate this. Searching through a gazillion mail messages in Gmail is faster than searching through local mailboxes on my computer, and Google does a better job of it too. Google Calendar feels almost the same – this is a webapp that outperforms almost all the desktop apps that came before it.

The search is fast and reliable

1356: Oooh, alerts. It’ll send me email, or pop up a browser window (hmm, might need to disable the popup killer first), or (in the USA, anyway) SMS me to alert me to something.

Friday

0900: Meeting with boss. Show him all this stuff. He might even like it.

1200: Team meeting. Here’s the plan. Everyone signs up for their own personal Google Calendar account, then creates a work-specific calendar within it which they make available to us via the sharing. The management team creates a shared account which they use as a “broadcast” mechanism for making announcements to everyone in the team. This is shared out to everyone too. When someone wants to book a meeting, they create an event and invite individuals, who simply use the invitation response system. People who need to can sync all this Google Calendar stuff with iCal or Outlook or even Lotus Notes if they have to. And they can grab an RSS feed for any calendar, which will work on any RSS reader on just about any platform or hardware. Nice.

1645: Boss says he’s not sure he can trust Google with all our team information. Loves everything about the app, loves the UI, loves the sharing stuff. Even thinks Google is a pretty cool company. But he’s not willing to hand over everything to them just like that. Same applies to any Google competitors we might have tried, like 30 Boxes. Project suspended.

1700: I was angry for a few minutes there, but I’ve calmed down and I can kind of see his point. There have been scare stories about Gmail accounts just disappearing into thin air, and the Google Terms & Conditions makes plain that they can’t be held responsible for disappearing data.

1730: What a week. I need a drink. What time is team drinks tonight? And where..?

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