Solo Technology

Couple days ago, when the Google Calendar Beta was announced I said I would be following up with a more complete review. Unfortunately, I probably won’t be doing that any time soon. There’s some neat technology with “gcal”, but it just doesn’t provide me anything that’s an improvement over what I have today. And that’s a bummer. What I have today is what I had over 6 years ago. You’d think there might be improvements?

But yeah. Long story short: My calendar life is, due to places I work, totally driven by MS Outlook and the invite stuff built into Exchange. My company uses Exchange. Our clients use Exchange. Even some of my “side project” clients send me meeting invites in that format. And for my purposes, this works well. Syncs easily to my PocketPC and, with the aid of ye olde’ intellisync for Yahoo Calendar, syncs easily back and forth with the family online calendar. (more on that here)

Conversely, here’s how you “migrate” events from Outlook to Google Calendar. Not something you want to be doing daily — and that only covers one direction.

Gcal gives me iCal format and the ability to import and export. Note that there’s a large difference between import/export and synchronization! I’ve run across outlook2ical and while I’m sure it works, it doesn’t seem like it’ll help make my life any easier. I just stumbled over something called RemoteCalendars that purports to help iCal and Outlook interoperability as well. Something to look into I suppose. Until I find something as brain dead simple as the one click solution I have now, I won’t be in a hurry to change.

And that’s a bummer. I’ve been waiting for the Google Calendar for so damned long. I think, however, that I let my expectations grow just a bit too high.

2 Responses to “Google Calendar — more”

1. Carl on April 14th, 2006 9:04 pm
   

   So you know you can send invites from Google Calendar to Outlook users right? And if you have a GMail account, people can invite you to events and they’ll be added to your calendar like with Exchange (The gmail integration is not active for all users yet, but it will be soon).

   Sync with Outlook is coming soon….

2. chris on April 14th, 2006 9:23 pm
   

   I would love to hear more about that last sentence, “Sync with Outlook is coming soon…”

   The other things you mention are really quite cool, don’t get me wrong. But all my invites come to my “corporate” Outlook email address. I’d like an easier way to get those to my google calendar (and vice-versa of course).

   Yes I’m whining.

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