Calendars Everywhere
I'm going to be honest with you. Buzzwords turn me completely off. This generally serves me pretty well. I avoid the hype train and catch on after the furious excitement is over and the kinks are worked out.
I have caught a little bit of this "cloud computing" bug that everyone is on about, though. It all started when my service provider's email went down for about the 300 millionth time. I decided I was fed up and started looking for a better provider for hosting my email. Upon discovering Google Apps was free and hosted email for a domain, that led me down the dark path. Now I'm looking for ways to shove EVERYTHING "in the cloud". My email, my contacts, my calendaring. Everything. And gosh darn it, it's awesome.
As part of my quest to get everything in the cloud, and thus accessible from everywhere (and disaster-proof!), I started looking at my calendar. I have the following devices and programs I'd like to use my calendar from:
- iPhone - Built-in calendaring application
- Macbook Pro - iCal (yes I bought a Macbook Pro... the iPhone halo effect is very real)
- PC @ Work - Outlook
As it turns out, Google has made it very simple to enable just this scenario.
For iCal, Google has enabled a set of syncronization technologies called WebDAV (and on top of this, CalDAV) to enable two-way sync of calendar data. iCal has native support for this. Instructions are here:
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=99358
As for Outlook, which has no native CalDAV support, you'll need an addin. Google has written one for us. Instructions are here:
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=98563&topic=13948
With the iPhone, unfortunately I can't find an over-the-air solution for this. I believe it is coming, seeing as how there seems to already be collaborative calendaring support in the iPhone 2.0 software (like for Exchange, and Apple's MobileMe service).
For the time being, you'll have to use the manual syncing capabilities of the iPhone. Simply sync your iPhone with iCal on the MacBook (through iTunes) and you are done.
So now I have my calendar at work, at home, and on my phone.
Trackbacks
Comments
