Using Cloud Services : Exploring Online Calendar Applications

Most computer users today have embraced keeping their schedules on their PCs. Not that the old-fashioned wall-hanging calendar is dead, it’s just that it’s a whole lot easier to track appointments and events electronically; the computer does all the busywork for you.

The problem, however, with using calendar software (such as Microsoft Outlook or Windows Calendar) is that all your appointments have to reside on a single computer. If you keep a personal calendar on your home PC, you can’t reference it from work or when you’re traveling. That limits the calculator program’s usefulness.

That’s why, instead of using a calendar that’s wedded to a single computer, many users are moving to web-based calendars. A web-based calendar service stores your calendars on the Internet, where they can be accessed from any computer that has an Internet connection. This lets you check your schedule when you’re on the road, even if your assistant in the office or your spouse at home has added new appointments since you left. Web-based calendars are also extremely easy to share with other users in any location, which make them great for collaborative projects.

We’ll look at some of the most popular web-based calendars next. Although there are some pay calendars out there, I find the free ones just as functional—and easier for group members to access, since they don’t have to pay to use them.

As to favorites, I admit to being a longtime user of Google Calendar; it does everything I need it to do. That said, Yahoo! Calendar does pretty much everything Google Calendar does, and should be another favorite, especially among non-business users. Then there’s Apple’s new MobileMe Calendar, which is already attracting a lot of attention; it should be considered by anyone also looking at the Google and Yahoo! applications.

Note

Keep up-to-date with the latest news about online calendar applications with the CalendarReview blog (www.calendarreview.com).

Google Calendar

The most popular web-based calendar today, no doubt due to its association with the web’s most-used search engine, is Google Calendar (calendar.google.com). Google Calendar is free, full featured, and easy to use. It lets you create both personal and shared calendars, which makes it ideal for tracking business group, family, and community schedules.

As you can see in Figure 7.1, Google Calendar looks pretty much like every other calendar you’ve ever seen. You enter your appointments (which Google calls “events”) directly into the calendar, which you can display in either daily, weekly, or monthly views. You can also, if you like, view your weekly agenda on a single page.

Figure 1. The easy-to-use interface of Google Calendar. Note the multiple calendars listed in the My Calendars box.

Like all web-based calendars, all your events are stored in the cloud (in this case, the cloud created by Google’s own network of servers), not on your own computer. This means that you can access your calendar from any computer anywhere in the world. Just log in to the Google Calendar page and your calendar and all events are there.

Because Google Calendar is web based, you can use it to create not only a private calendar for yourself, but also public calendars for your company or organization. Create a public calendar and all employees or attendees can access it via the web. In addition, special event invitation features make it easy to invite others to an event—public or private.

In addition, Google allows you to create several different—and different types of—calendars. You can create one calendar for home, another for work, and yet another for your son’s soccer team. Then you can view all your calendars from the same Google Calendar page, with the events from each calendar color-coded for easy visibility.

What types of calendars can you create with Google Calendar? Here’s the list:

  • Personal calendars, like your default calendar

  • Public calendars, which others can access via the web

  • Friends’ calendars, which you import from their Google Calendar web pages

  • Holiday calendars, which add national holidays to a basic calendar

Setting up a new calendar is comically easy. In fact, there’s nothing to set up. When you first sign into the Google Calendar page, your calendar is already there, waiting for your input. There’s nothing to create, nothing to configure. Can it get any easier than that?

And here’s something unique about Google Calendar. Because it’s part of the mighty Google empire, Google Calendar integrates smoothly with Google’s Gmail application. Google Calendar can scan your email messages for dates and times and, with a few clicks of your mouse, create events based on the content of your Gmail messages.

Note

When you’re reading a Gmail message that contains information pertaining to an event, just pull down the More Action menu and select Create Event. This opens a New Event window. Enter the appropriate information, click Save Changes, and the event is added to your Google Calendar.

For all these reasons, I’m a big fan and longtime user of Google Calendar. I recommend it to any user for home or business use.

Yahoo! Calendar

One of Google Calendar’s primary competitors is Yahoo! Calendar (calendar.yahoo.com), hosted by its search competitor Yahoo! This web-based calendar looks, feels, and functions quite similarly to Google Calendar, and is also free for anyone to use.

Yahoo! Calendar’s similarity to Google Calendar can be seen in Figure 2. To be honest, most web-based calendars have a similar visual look. (How different can you make a calendar look, anyway?) One subtle difference in Yahoo! Calendar, however, is the presence of an Add Task button. This reflects Yahoo! Calendar’s offering of tasks in addition to events. You can still add individual items to your daily schedule, but you can also add longer-term tasks and have their due dates show up on your calendar. It’s a nice addition.

Figure 2. The familiar look and feel of Yahoo! Calendar.

Of course, you can share your Yahoo! calendars with other users, in a collaborative environment. Just click the Sharing link and indicate how you want to share—no sharing, view-only for friends, view-only for anyone, or view-only with special friends allowed to edit. Choose this last option for true collaboration.

At present, Yahoo! Calendar only lets you create a single calendar. All your events, public and private, have to be stored on this calendar; you can’t create different calendars for different functions. (That’s one advantage that Google has over Yahoo! here.)

Windows Live Calendar

Because Google and Yahoo! both offer web-based calendars, it’s no surprise that the third-largest search site also has a competitive offering. Windows Live Calendar (mail.live.com/mail/calendar.aspx) is Microsoft’s web-based calendar, actually part of the Windows Live Hotmail email service.

Windows Live Calendar looks a lot like both of its primary competitors. It offers tasks, like Yahoo! Calendar, and also lets you schedule meetings with other calendar and Hotmail users. (Figure 3 shows the page you use to send a meeting request.) Naturally, you can share your calendars with authorized users for group collaboration.

Figure 3. Scheduling a group meeting with Windows Live Calendar.

Apple MobileMe Calendar

Apple’s MobileMe (www.me.com) is a new competitor in the web-based apps market. It includes online mail, contacts, and calendar, as well as an online photo gallery and file storage. We’ll examine the other components of MobileMe in the appropriate chapters in this book; for now, let’s focus on MobileMe’s calendar component.

The MobileMe Calendar is, of course, a web-based calendar that can be accessed from any computer connected to the Internet, Mac or Windows. What makes it more unique and potentially more useful is that it can also be accessed from Apple’s iPhone, which makes it a truly mobile calendar. As with competing calendars, you can display MobileMe in daily, weekly, or monthly modes. And, as you can see in Figure 4, MobileMe lets you create multiple calendars and display them all on the same screen, using different colors for each calendar. You can also synchronize your MobileMe calendars with Apple’s iCal and Microsoft Outlook calendars.

Figure 4. One of the newest web-based calendars—Apple’s MobileMe Calendar.

Even though MobileMe Calendar doesn’t offer much new or innovative (save for the iPhone interoperability, of course), it’s bound to be a strong competitor in the online apps market, especially for non-business users. That’s partly because of Apple’s cachet (everything Steve Jobs does is cool, for some folks), and partly because Apple does tend to get the details right. Let’s face it, MobileMe Calendar looks and feels a little slicker than all its competitors, Google Calendar included. It’s certainly worth a look—even if you’re already using another online calendar.

AOL Calendar

America Online isn’t quite the powerhouse that it used to be, but it still has millions of users, both paid subscribers and free web users. Any registered user can access AOL Calendar (calendar.aol.com), which integrates with the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) service for both instant messaging and email. As with competing calendars, AOL Calendar lets you share calendars with authorized users; your calendars can be either private or public.

CalendarHub

Beyond Google, Yahoo!, Apple, and their ilk, many independent sites offer full-featured web-based calendars. Perhaps the most notable of these is CalendarHub (www.calendarhub.com), shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. CalendarHub—one of the most full-featured calendar applications on the web.

CalendarHub offers all the features found in the previously discussed web-based calendars—private/public calendars, sharing/collaboration, multiple calendars, task-based to-do lists, and the like. In addition, CalendarHub lets you publish calendars on your blog or website, which makes it great for creating sites for community groups, sports teams, and the like. Other users can sign up to receive email notification of new events, or subscribe to RSS feeds for any calendar view. And, of course, it’s completely free.

Hunt Calendars

Hunt Calendars (www.huntcal.com) offers event-based web calendars. Useful features include email reminders, notification of event conflicts, notification of new and updated events, and the like.

The site lets you add web links and images to calendar events, which is fairly unique. Also nice is the ability to customize the color scheme and graphics to reflect your organization’s look and feel, as illustrated in Figure 6. This makes Hunt Calendars particularly attractive to businesses and community groups.

Figure 6. A customized calendar for the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, courtesy of Hunt Calendars.

Famundo

If you keep the schedule for a community group, check out Famundo (www.famundo.com). This site offers Famundo for Organizations, a free web-based calendar ideal for schools, churches, sports teams, and the like. (Figure 7 shows a typical school calendar, with different colors used for different types of events.) After the public calendar has been created, users can subscribe to be notified of new and upcoming events. You can also add message boards, blogs, and other features to your calendar.

Figure 7. A school calendar created with Famundo for Organizations.

The company also offers Famundo for Families, a personal version of their Organizations calendar. This version includes a family address book and message board, to facilitate family communication.

eStudio Calendar

eStudio Calendar (www.same-page.com/calendar-software.html) is designed specifically for business use. You get three types of calendars in a single interface:

  • Member Event calendar helps users manage their personal time, keep track of meetings with others, and so on.

  • Team Event calendar is used to schedule activities for a group, as well as schedule facilities.

  • Supervisor calendar provides reports to managers about business activities and schedules.

In addition, you can use eStudio Calendar to broadcast information about group activities (via email) and to schedule meetings. Information about company events can also be automatically published to your website.

30Boxes

The name of 30Boxes (www.30boxes.com) refers to the 30 “boxes” displayed on a typical monthly calendar. The site itself offers a slick interface for adding events, as you can see in Figure 8. All your events can be shared with other designated users, plus you get to-do lists, a link to Google’s Gmail, and similar useful features.

Figure 8. The easy-to-use interface for entering events into a 30Boxes calendar.

Trumba

Trumba (www.trumba.com) offers web-based calendars ideal for community organizations, schools, and similar public entities. The company lets you embed individualized widgets (dubbed “spuds”), like the one in Figure 9, in your own website. These widgets let users view full calendars, add events to the schedule, receive email notification of events, and such.

Figure 9. A few of the Trumba widgets you can add to your own web page.

Calendars Net

Calendars Net (www.calendars.net) is a free web-based calendar designed for companies or individuals who want to add interactive calendars to their websites. A typical calendar fits into a frame on your website, with little coding required.

The site also hosts personal calendars in the cloud. You can employ four different levels of security (so that different users can view the calendar), add events, edit events, and even change universal calendar settings.

Jotlet

Here’s another way to add web-based calendar functionality to your website. Jotlet (www.jotlet.net) is a JavaScript API and library that you can use to build rich calendar functionality into any web page. If you’re skilled in HTML programming, this is a good way to build a calendar-based page. The Jotlet API is free for noncommercial use, and also available (for a fee) for commercial sites.